The Helpers

A young man throws away a fortune in a Colorado mining camp and is put back together by the people the boom has left behind: a doctor, a newspaperman and a woman running a mission nobody funds. Francis Lynde worked for the railroads across the West and wrote its business as accurately as its scenery. The helping in the title goes both ways, and the book is unsentimental about the cost. Fifty-nine plates of American landscape painting by Albert Bierstadt and George Inness, from Yosemite to the Sierra Nevada, match the scale of the Western country Lynde knew.