Sunset Pass; or, Running the Gauntlet through Apache Land

No writer is better than Charles King at bringing the reader vividly and realistically into the life of a U. S. Army soldier during the late-19th-early-20th century. Because of his personal experience as an officer in the conflicts of that period, he not only gets the historical details correct, but also the settings, moods, and day-to-day life, including the personal, romantic, financial, and family life of the soldiers living on those far-flung military posts along the western frontier.

In Sunset Pass he exposes what should have been obvious, though something that most of us probably never consider: that those cavalrymen fighting the Indian wars of the Wild West had families and sometimes had to move those families in and out of, and through, some very dangerous war zones—in this case the Apache war zone in the Territory of Arizona during the 1870s. And sometimes, as the author herein describes—no doubt basing the story on something that actually happened—those brave soldiers of the Indian wars made mistakes in judgment as they planned these family trips, endangering the very people they least wanted to expose.

This particular Charles King novel is enhanced by twenty illustrations by an artist who was unfortunately not credited on the title page, which is a shame because the illustrations are pretty good and the artist deserves credit.

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.