Let not the size of ["The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters"] dismay you. It is a small-scale "Anthony Adverse" of the California gold rush with touches of "Huckleberry Finn," a lively, often funny, picaresque tale that conveys a real feel of what it must have been like on the immigrant trails and in the gold fields, and only occasionally does the story become too long. The publisher's blurb stresses the author's "meticulously researched facts," and he himself appends a bibliography of nigh on to 150 titles, but he is too good a novelist to let mere facts stand in the way of a good story.

Considering the enjoyment this reviewer had from the book, he should not carp at minor faults, but a few comments must be made. On the score of "meticulous research," it is odd to find Algonkian words in the mouths of Caddoan-speaking Pawnees, or an Indian...