For every forthright Forty-Niner pursuing high fortune and a better life in the streambeds and rocky draws of the West, the history of prospecting the vast frontier offers up hundreds of tales of parasitical people preying on gullible greenhorns and seeking easy access to fortune and fame. The list of such precious-metal-and-gemstone-related larcenies in the Old West and the Far North is legion and long and ripe for the reading. These memorable moments are sometimes humorous, often shocking and brutal, and always all-too-true. Sourdoughs, Claim Jumpers & Dry Gulchers offers fifty tales of hard-bitten sourdoughs, petty bandits, outright outlaws, guilt-free gunmen, and murderous money-grubbers as they scrabbled to gain the lands, foodstuffs, and fortunes of wide-eyed greenhorns, gullible and trusting tenderfoots, and slow-on-the-draw gold panners.
