Readers who wish to get a full sense of Louis L'Amour's productions, for whatever purposes, must inevitably take on his two blockbusters, Bendigo Shafter and Comstock Lode. These two novels, in their separate ways, continue the historical mode that L'Amour launched into with Sackett's Land, Rivers West, and Fair Blows the Wind, with the exception that the main characters of the later two novels are not members of the Sackett, Talon, or Chantry families. Both are marketed as historical novels rather than as Westerns….

In their broader features they perpetuate the pattern of all of L'Amour's fiction: there is a superlative hero who fights through adversity to ensure that the country will be settled and developed properly. Good and evil are clearly distinguishable from one another, and the conflict is resolved unequivocally through violence. The plot resolution, along with a steady stream of narrative comments, affirms the broadly...