About this ebook
IN THE CIVIL WAR the Copperheads almost took over the state of Oregon. Big Adam Musick, river-boat pilot, went out to stop them.
He caught Ringrose, the Copperhead leader, holed up in a dark warehouse beside the flooding river.
"I came to get you, Ringrose," Musick said.
"God damn you!" Ringrose shouted. The floor jumped as his gun went off, and Musick felt the heat of the bullet. Then he tackled Ringrose around the knees and they went crashing together down the flimsy stairway into the waist-deep water.
Musick was on top of his enemy, choking him, holding him under to drown. Ringrose was everything he hated. Then he remembered. This wasn't just his fight. This was his country's war and Ringrose should hang for a traitor, not die by one man's hand.
"LONG STORM—HAYCOX AT HIS BEST!"—The New York Times
"The Old Frontier, the rough-and-ready life of the times—the historical novel at its best!"—BOSTON HERALD
THROUGH THE LONG STORM OF THE CIVIL WAR, THE FOUR SAVAGE YEARS THAT SPLIT THE UNION, THE RICH NORTHWEST WAS A DEFENSELESS PRIZE FOR EITHER NORTH OR SOUTH
Portland, Oregon, was a town with five thousand inhabitants and fifty-five saloons, high-toned hotels and brothels, gaudy girl-shows and a fancy residential section, plank sidewalks and mud streets.
Every day more gold prospectors poured into town, and with them came guns and secret agents from the Confederacy, supplies from the Copperheads who were determined to turn Oregon into a slave state. Only one man, Adam Musick, tough riverboat captain, saw the danger to the Union cause...
Ernest Haycox, all-time great writer of the Old West, gives us this big, full-bodied novel, crammed with action and people...
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About the author
Ernest James Haycox (October 1, 1899 - October 13, 1950) was an American author of Western fiction.
Born in Portland, Oregon, to William James Haycox and the former Martha Burghardt, he attended local schools of both Washington state and Oregon. He enlisted in the United States Army in 1915 and was stationed along the Mexican border in 1916. During World War I he served in Europe, and after the war he spent one year at Reed College in Portland. In 1923, he graduated from the University of Oregon with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism. He married Jill M. Chord in 1925 and the couple had two children.
Haycox published two dozen novels and around 300 short stories, many of which appeared first in pulp magazines in the early 1920s. During the 1930s and 1940s, he was a regular contributor to Collier's Weekly from 1931 and The Saturday Evening Post from 1943. Fans of his work included Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway.
His story Stage to Lordsburg (1937) was made into the movie Stagecoach (1939), directed by John Ford and featuring John Wayne in the role that made him a star. The novel Trouble Shooter (1936), originally serialized in Collier's, was the basis for the movie Union Pacific (1939), directed by Cecil B. DeMille, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea. Haycox wrote the screenplay for Montana (1950), directed by Ray Enright, which stars Alexis Smith and Errol Flynn.
Haycox died in 1950, at the age of 51, in Portland. In 2005 the Western Writers of America voted Haycox one of the 24 best Western authors of the Twentieth Century.
