Pearl Zane Grey (1872-1939) was an American author (and dentist!) best known for his popular adventure novels and stories associated with the western genre; he idealized the American frontier. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was his best-selling book.

Grey was born in Zanesville, Ohio, on January 31, 1872. His parents were Lewis Grey and Alice Josephine Zane Grey. He was an excellent baseball player in school and won a baseball scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied to become a dentist. After graduating, Grey established his practice in New York City under the name of Dr. Zane Grey in 1896. It was a competitive area but he wanted to be close to publishers to pursue his dream of being a writer. He began to write in the evening to offset the tedium of his dental practice.

His first novel, Betty Zane, was inspired by stories he heard about the Ohio frontier as a child. Unfortunately, he was unable to sell it at the time and self-published it. He began to study his craft and travel to the west, taking notes and copying down dialog he heard. He studied other successful novels, such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian, and continued to polish his craft. His next three novels were all rejected by publishers, though. Instead of giving up, though, he perseviered.

Grey married longtime girlfriend Lina Elise “Dolly” Roth in 1905 after a passionate and intense courtship marked by frequent quarrels. After they married, Dolly gave up her teaching career. They moved to a farmhouse at the confluence of the Lackawaxen and Delaware rivers, in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, where Grey's mother and sister joined them. (This house, now preserved and operated as the Zane Grey Museum, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.) Grey finally ceased his dental practice to work full-time on his nascent literary pursuits. Dolly's inheritance provided an initial financial cushion.

Finally Grey got his first break, selling The Heritage of the Desert in 1910 to Harper's Magazine. It became a best-seller. Two years later, Harper’s also published Riders of the Purple Sage—and his career was properly launched. Zane Grey was officially more than a one-book wonder.

After publication of The Heritage of the Desert, the family had moved west to Altadena, California. Grey also aquired a hunting lodge in Arizona. Each year, Grey spent time traveling in the west and fishing in the Pacific. He then would return home and spend time writing.

While Dolly managed Grey's career and raised their three children (Romer, Betty, and Loren), over the next two decades Grey often spent months away from the family. He fished, wrote, and spent time with his many mistresses. While Dolly knew of this behavior, she seemed to view it as his handicap rather than a choice. Throughout their life together, he highly valued her management of his career and their family, and her solid emotional support. In addition to her considerable editorial skills, she had good business sense and handled all his contract negotiations with publishers, agents, and movie studios. All his income was split fifty-fifty with her; from her “share” she covered all family expenses. Their considerable correspondence shows evidence of his lasting love for her despite his infidelities and personal emotional turmoil.

Grey died unexpectedly of a heart attack on October 23, 1939. By the time of his death, he had authored almost ninety books. The majority were westerns, but he also wrote nine books that had a fishing theme; several about baseball; a biography of George Washington as a young man; many short stories; and several stories for children.

—Karl Wurf

Rockville, Maryland

CHAPTER 1

Flowing out from the moss-greened base of a bluff under the bold, looming bulk of Black Mesa was a small spring of alkaline water. It was the only oasis in that desolate country for leagues around. The Indian brought his mustangs there, and the squaw filled her earthen olla; the cowboy trailed his lost cattle over the bleak, cedar-dotted divide down to this spring, and the traveler followed the hard-beaten path to eye askance the strange, clear pool. Cougar and cat tracks showed in the soft red sands. The deer and coyote and jack rabbit slaked their thirst there. But the winged creatures of the desert, those whose wide pinions gave them dominance over distance, never visited the foot of Black Mesa.

The spring had been named Bitter Seeps by the Mormons when they forded the Rio Colorado at the Crossing of the Fathers. Noddlecoddy, the old Navajo chief, said of Bitter Seeps: “It is not good water, but it will sustain life.”

A great geologist, studying that region, had remarked that the nature of man and beast dependent upon the water of the spring and its forbidding surroundings must partake of its hard and bitter quality.

Two young men sat upon a rock of the cedar ridge that commanded a view of the trading post, the spring, the mesa, and the illimitable desert beyond.

“Paul, yore askin’ me aboot this heah place,” drawled the younger, a lean brown-faced, tow-headed cowboy. “Wal, I reckon it’s hell an’ I wouldn’t be caught heah daid.”

His companion laughed a little regretfully at this frank opinion. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It appeals to me. Perhaps you’ve explained why.”

“Nope,”

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