Philip Woodhouse

* Meticulously researched, engagingly written stories
* Filled with historical photographs

The Monte Cristo area, pocketed in spectacularly beautiful mountains in the Pacific Northwest, has long intrigued visitors with its colorful history, rooted in the search for gold and silver as rich as the Count of Monte Cristo. Here is the complete story, from discovery to disillusionment as dreamed-of riches became the dust of a ghost town.

The several decades of Monte Cristo's glory also saw the construction of the unique Everett & Monte Cristo Railway (a marvelous engineering mistake), and the founding of the city of Everett as a processing and shipping point for the expected riches of Monte's minesñall manipulated by Eastern corporate giants such as Rockefeller and the Guggenheims. And then there were the peopleñthe struggling railroaders, miners, merchants and their families, who dreamed, worked, failed and sometimes died in Monte Cristo's unforgiving winters.

What was the true extent of Monte Cristo's fabled riches? How could the skilled geologists of the day be so wrong? The answers, for Monte Cristo like so many other boom-and-bust towns of the Old West, make fascinating reading.