TOM SHARP: The Man and the Legend (A Novel) is a fast-paced, hard-hitting, and carefully-woven mixture of fact and fiction about a young wounded Confederate soldier from Marion County, Missouri, who became a famous and respected Westerner.
Discharged from his enlistment, Tom Sharp joined a wagon train and traveled west. He aimed to earn his fortune, homestead a ranch, marry Katherine Durrett, the lovely young lady he was betrothed to, and start a family. On his dangerous and exciting quest, Sharp encountered renegades, Indians, and slavers--as well as frontiersmen who taught him how to survive in the mountains and on the plains.
Although many of the tales are based on actual events and adventures that Tom Sharp experienced, author Charlie Steel engages his craft as a master storyteller and embellishes and adds situations to honor the accomplishments and integrity of this great man from Colorado.
Tom Sharp’s life, embellished or not, is a story that needs to be told. He was a soldier, buffalo hunter, meat provider for the California and Oregon gold miners, meat provider for the Union Pacific Railroad workers, multiline telegraph pole cutter for the railroad, deputy sheriff, rancher, established and ran a copper stamping mill, built and operated Buzzard Roost Trading Post, bred thoroughbred horses, raised cattle, and was an advocate for Indians, especially Chief Ouray and his band of Utes.
Steel writes a story that rivets the reader creating well-rounded characters that provide a unique and more realistic perspective of the WEST.
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REVIEW BY SPUR AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR ROBERT VAUGHAN:
It has been said, and rightly so, that a historical novel, accurately and skillfully crafted, can teach history better than the straightforward information in a non-fiction historical text. That is because if the writer is skillful, the reader won't just read about the characters but will interact with them. They become the reader's close friends so that the heroism and the pathos experienced can be enjoyed.
Charlie Steel's excellent novel, TOM SHARP, invites the reader into the life and historical time of the title character. Opening with Tom Sharp being wounded during the Civil War, this historically accurate novel follows him throughout the West, from hunting and supplying meat to the miners to providing telegraph poles to the Union Pacific Railroad in the Dakota Territory.
This is not only an adventure story; it also has a strong and accurate element of romance when Tom returns to Missouri to marry Katherine, a young woman from his past.
Tom eventually builds Buzzard Roost Trading Post, where he trades with and befriends the Ute Indians, particularly Chief Ouray and his wife, Chipeta. As in any great novel, there are fictional characters developed with such skill and depth that they become real to the reader, and in this book, Charlie Steel creates, from whole cloth, fictional characters who interact with actual, historical people.
It is a book well worth the investment of time it takes to read.
