Gold Under Ice, the sequel to God’s Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana, which won the 2009 Spur for Best First Novel from the Western Writers of America, takes up only two months after Carol Buchanan's first novel ends.
Readers won't have missed many happenings that winter in Alder Gulch. All your favorite characters are still here, Dan Stark, New York lawyer, hero and vigilante prosecutor in Montana; Martha McDowell, his beloved intended; her two children, Dotty and bad-boy Timothy; the funny and feisty Jew Jacob Himmelfarb; and the annoying Fitch, a one-armed Confederate whose views clash with Dan's.
It seems as if most of Virginia City had gathered near Alder Creek when the spring ice breaks, resulting in a dramatic rescue that begins the book.
The saved man is yet another New York attorney, but one sent to bring Dan and his gold back to New York. Unfortunately, Dan doesn't have enough of it to rescue his family there from poverty. To pay the debt they owe from his father's embezzlement and suicide, he could trade gold options and futures in the Gold Room, a market denounced by all patriotic Northerners.
The high price of gold there devalues the Lincoln Administration's greenback. That paper money pays for its war with the Confederacy; on Wall Street, the Gold Room renegade money market pits the greenback against gold. By January 1864, the greenback loses nearly half its value. Dan faces the untenable choice of risking all his gold and his reputation in the Gold Room or failing his family.
He mulls over his dilemma while in Montana. A financial report in an old New York Times stirs in him the notion of repaying the bank in greenbacks. Maybe speculating in the Gold Room would earn a fortune large enough to repay the bank and secure his family's future. Or he could lose everything, just like his father did.
Although he must return to New York, Dan hates the thought of leaving his common-law wife, Martha, and facing his autocratic grandfather.
Article comments
1 - Georganna Hancock
The author let me know that her research was confined to Montana. She says,"One historian remarked that when the miners in Alder Gulch (Montana) named their gold camp Virginia City they set up an unending confusion with the other Virginia City in Nevada. That’s for sure! Two mining camps of the same name, but several hundred miles apart."
They certainly managed to confuse me, too!