Guns, Gold, and Caravans: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Fred Meyer Schroder [signed]

Using the first person to capture the voice and idiom of his protagonist, Easton has written a fast-moving biography of a man in the thick of the events, in the days when much of the world was a frontier and nature an adversary. Fred Schroder was raised on a California-Mexican border ranch in the 1880s, ran cattle and horses through bandit land, survived a shootout. He spent his next years in the Yukon during the great Klondike Gold Rush, when geese darkened the skies and a meal of moose was standard fare. China, Mongolia and Siberia next fed Schroder's insatiable hunger for frontier adventure. He spent his mature years as a trader and trouble-shooter with the British-American Tobacco Company and collected specimens for the British and Smithsonian Museums. He got involved in two revolutions and one coup d'etat, found time to meet some notable women, and visited the mysterious flat-topped pyramids of Shensi. He was a member of the rescue team which briefly restored the last Manchu emperor to the Dragon Throne. Schroder experienced nature as it never will be again - when the California desert was still inhabited by free Indians, the Yukon watershed occupied by only 300 white men, and trade was still carried on by camel caravan in the vast wilds of Mongolia. Those were the days of plenty when a man could ride a horse for a month and never see a piece of plowed ground or a telephone pole. This biography will fascinate lovers of the outdoors, history buffs and general readers of frontier adventure.