Signal Butte (PDF version)

THIS IS THE PDF VERSION OF THE BOOK.

No writer is better than Charles King—at the point when this novel was published a captain, but eventually a general—at bringing the reader more vividly and realistically into the life of a U. S. Army soldier during the wars with the Indians of the American West.  Because of his personal experience of those wars, he not only gets the historical details correct, but also the settings, moods, and day-to-day life, including the personal, romantic, and family life of the soldiers and women living on those far-flung military posts along the western frontier.

Signal Butte was published originally in 1895 when Arizona was still a territory, statehood seventeen years in the future, and takes place in the 1870s, before trains and telegraph lines had connected the area.  The Apache tribes were fierce enemies of the encroaching United States, and to protect settlers and miners the U. S. had small, isolated forts scattered across the territory.  This novella-sized work of fiction—shorter than Captain King’s usual work—tells a story about one of those forts, Fort Retribution (presumed fictional), and features as two of the primary heroes a couple of young boys.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.