Publisher's Synopsis
When 22-year-old Dix Van Dyke arrived in Daggett, California, in 1901, the town was a wild and raucous frontier settlement, with bar rooms and brothels, silver mines and land swindles, cattle drives, and shootouts at the Bucket of Blood saloon. Dix, a ranch-boy with no formal education but whose father and uncle were writers, became the town's unofficial historian.;Edited and introduced by the poet and nature writer Peter Wild, this is Dix Van Dyke's account of how the 20th century arrived in a California frontier town. Located a 100 miles outside Los Angeles and just east of Barstow in the Mojave Desert, Daggett attracted a rich assortment of settlers lured by the wealth of nearby silver mines of the promise of cheap farmland conjured up by dubious irrigation schemes. With wit, humour, and a writer's eye for the telling detail, Dix describes the delicate beauty of the desert and the human hopes that often ended in folly there.
