A "good yarn". A long account of the travel west by the twelve-year-old Jaimie, his father, and their friends, to the gold fields in California. It's a much better novel than 95% of the stuff written today, I'm just not sure it's in the same league with some of the better Pulitzer winners I have read.
The problem is that it seems to be based on true accounts. Truth is stranger than fiction, and to have so many things happen to the travelers seems unrealistic. The boy gets kidnapped by bandits, captured by Indians, becomes a blood brother to a Sioux chief, is chased by radical Mormons, makes and loses a fortune, and so on and so forth. It's too much. Any one of these incidents would have made a great novel, to think that the boy lived through and survived all these incidents is too much.
And the thing that irks me the most is the use of dialect throughout, in dialog and narrative. That really grates on my nerves.
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