The Great Trek

Sterl Hazelton is no stranger to trouble. But the shooting that made him an outlaw was one he didn't do. Though it was his cousin who pulled the trigger, Sterl took the blame, and now he has to leave the country if he wants to stay healthy. Sterl and his loyal friend, Red Krehl, set out for the greatest adventure of their lives, signing on for a cattle drive across the vast northern desert of Australia to the gold fields of the Kimberley Mountains. But it seems no matter where Sterl goes, trouble is bound to follow!

One of the finest novels of Zane Grey's career, The Great Trek has never been available in paperback as Grey wrote it - until now. Faced with war-time paper shortages, his publisher cut the novel to barely one-third of its original length and published the result as The Wilderness Trek. Now, finally, Grey's epic full-length novel has been restored and can be read the way it was meant to be.

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An abbreviated version of this tale called The Wilderness Trek was published in 1944, although the original novel was written in 1937 after the author's 1935 visit to Australia. Here it is presented in its original form; at 615 pages, it is among the usually concise Grey's longest novels. It is the story of one of the most dangerous cattle drives ever undertaken across the outback, covering several thousand miles of rough wilderness and parched desert and ending at the Kimberly Mountains on the northwest coast, where gold was plentiful but beef was in short supply. A pair of American cowboys, Sterl Hazelton and Red Krehl, who left home after an unfortunate shooting incident, help the Aussie drovers and find both adventure and romance down under. (Readers should be aware that an ugly racial epithet appears in dialogue about Australian aborigines.) Budd Arthur Read more Continue reading Read less