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Don't miss these other great books in the exciting Adventure of the Old West series!

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  Bane Messenger Bounty Hunter

(A novella prequel to the series)

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A prequel to the series An Adventure of the Old West, this action-packed short story introduces Bane Messenger, a Union veteran of the Civil War, who teams with former Confederate commander Colonel Jake Miller to become a bounty hunter.

On the trail of a vicious outlaw wanted for kidnapping and murder during a series of robberies, Bane hones his tracking, reconnaissance, and fighting skills.

His final showdown with his deadly quarry will show Bane just how good he is with a gun and launch his career as a man who makes a living by bringing killers to justice, dead or alive.

 

Good with a Gun

(Book 1 of the series)

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Bounty hunter Bane Messenger is good with a gun, but he wants more out of life than hunting down fugitives from the law. He wants a wife and children. He wants a home of his own. He wants to know why his father abandoned his mother and him. 

But all he knows is how to track and capture or kill the worst sort of men who roam the West, taking what they want, whether money, property, or women, at the point of a gun.

When he meets the right woman, though, he vows his life will change; he will change, if he can. 

 

The Valley of the Shadow

(Book 2 of the series)

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Mysterious strangers. Big money. Corrupt politicians. Murder. Mayhem. Hired guns. After a drunk is broken out of Excelsior, Nevada's, jailhouse, former bounty hunter Bane Messenger joins a posse to hunt down the escaped prisoner and his accomplices.

Surviving an ambush in which the sheriff and deputy are killed, Bane tracks down the assassins. But, when he returns to Excelsior, he finds that the town's last lawman has also been murdered. Now, a cartel controls the town, using paid gunmen to enforce new laws for their own benefit.

Determined to bring law and order back to his hometown, Bane faces a fierce fight only guns can settle, but he learns there's more to enforcing justice than just being good with a gun.

 

Blood Mountain

(Book 3 of the series)

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After years as a bounty hunter and a sheriff, Bane Messenger wants to enjoy a quiet life with his family. They buy land in Nevada's Great Basin, planning to build a remote family retreat, but when they visit the property, armed men attack them, intent upon forcing them to vacate the premises, claiming Bane and his family are trespassing on private property.

Before this new nightmare ends, Bane will strike it rich, be tried for kidnapping and murder, and take on an “army” of veteran soldiers determined to kill him and his entire family.

On the Track of Vengeance 

(Book 4 of the series)

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The runaway action never stops in On the Track of Vengeance, the fourth book in An Adventure of the Old West series. When outlaw gangs sabotage railroads, resulting in the deaths of innocent passengers and crew members, the president of the United States becomes directly involved, appointing Bane Messenger a U. S. marshal answerable to him alone.

Teamed with trustworthy deputies, Bane takes on the desperate men, who care only for vengeance and are willing to do anything to strike back at the railroads and the government they blame for their misfortunes. But the stakes soar when Bane learns that the outlaws plan to sabotage a train carrying his wife and father.

With their lives hanging in the balance and no way to warn them, Bane races to the scene. Can he stop the outlaws in time or will Pamela and Bradford become the latest victims of the cruel men who care for nothing but vengeance?

The Transcontinental Railroad: The Greatest American Achievement of the 19th Century!

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Active Member of the Western Writers Association

Click the image to enlarge it.

In 1862, Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act, authorizing and funding the construction of the transcontinental railroad.

Two companies would lay the track, surveying routes, constructing trestles and bridges, blasting tunnels through mountains or ledges out of sheer mountainsides, fighting Native Americans who resisted whites' encroachment upon their ancestral lands, and, of course, laying track. The Cheyenne removed sections of track and cut telegraph lines and attacked repairmen.[1] The Sioux and Arapaho joined them in attacking settlers, stealing from them, removing surveyors's stakes, derailing trains, and killing railroad workers.[2]

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Along the way, the companies' workers also strung hundreds of miles of telegraph lines, connecting the western and the eastern halves of the nation both by both rail and wire and making transportation and communication available across the continental United States.

It was a huge enterprise, the biggest of the nineteenth century, and enormously expensive, costing between $96 million and $111.5 million[3] and requiring 10,000 horses and as many workers for the Union Pacific Railroad alone[4], Irish (on the Union Pacific railroad's crews). Chinese made up 80 percent of the Central Pacific Railroad's workers, and Civil War veterans and 1,000 freed African-American slaves worked for both railroads.[5] Whites were paid $35 per month, Chinese $30 per month; Chinese workers were also provided food, including special items that had to be brought by railroad from the east.[6] In Utah, Mormon laborers also helped to build the railroad.[7]

UPRR workers who took their meals aboard the company's supply train ate in a dining car, which sat 125 men per shift. Their tin plates were nailed to the tabletop, and between meals consisting of beef, hard bread, boiled beans, and black coffee, kitchen workers "cleaned" the plates with hand-help "mops."[8]

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Workers had to contend with blizzards, landslides, thunderstorms, mountains, and Native Americans who sought to defend their lands from the iron horse and the settlements of whites the railroad inevitably brought.

The men who built the transcontinental railroad lived under harsh conditions. Quarters aboard the UPRR's supply train were crowded and infested with lice, so many men preferred to sleep in tents.[9] Bathing occurred rarely, and most camps smelled of sweat and worse, as drinking water was contaminated with bacteria that caused diarrhea.[10]

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As much as possible, construction followed a set pattern: surveyors, operating as much as 100 miles in advance of other work crews[11], selected the path and marked it with stakes.

Then, grading crews leveled the pathway, building a raised bed, 12-feet wide (wide enough to accommodate two sets of side-by-side tracks), to lay track on. The graders' bosses leveled the bed with shovels or a heavy scraper haled by horses or oxen. When graders ran into rocks they couldn't move, they used explosives to blast them. Additional crews built bridges or blasted tunnels as needed.[12]

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 Next, a work crew laid ties (six-foot-long, split logs or planks) on the bed. The men then laid 28-foot-long, 500-pound iron rails[13] on the ties, securing them in place by hammering iron spikes through the rails and into the wood. The track layers worked in pairs, five on each side of a rail.[14]

The construction of the transcontinental railroad took about six years. The CPRR broke ground in Omaha, Nebraska, on January 8, 1863, and its railroad joined the UPRR's line at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869.

There's much more to the story, including the solutions engineers developed for the tremendous problems they encountered due to adverse weather and seemingly insurmountable obstacles that certain terrain features presented. Greed and immorality also caused complications and significant cost overruns. Look for these stories in future posts!

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[1]The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad by Peggy Caravantes

[2]The Transcontinental Railroad by Christine Zuchora-Walske

[3]The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad by Peggy Caravantes

[4]Ibid.

[5]The Transcontinental Railroad by Christine Zuchora-Walske

[6]The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad by Peggy Caravantes

[7]The Incredible Transcontinental Railroad by Conrad Stein.

[8]Ibid.

[9]Ibid.

[10]The Transcontinental Railroad by Christine Zuchora-Walske

[11]The Incredible Transcontinental Railroad by Conrad Stein.

[12]The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad by Peggy Caravantes

[13]The Incredible Transcontinental Railroad by Conrad Stein.

[14]The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad by Peggy Caravantes