Gathering At Vantage

About the Book

Perhaps this is a romance, or it could be an accounting of the way life was in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

            They came to Vantage over a five-decade period—drifters, entrepreneurs, developers, the railroad, the ranchers, the Blacks, the Irish, beautiful women, including a Kentucky belle and a yound Irish immigrant.  The mystic hanging valley, high in the Rocky Mountains, isolated, almost hidden from civilization, captured and held them except for a few escapees.  Their lives were at times shaped by a Victorian society.  A bank robbery compounded the problems.  On a lesser scale that foreshadowed major issues of the coming century, the resident engaged in racial and environmental incidents.  Drugs, a major problem even in that time, took their toll.  Residents often found refuge in the cemetery that held a venerated place above the town and provided a panoramic view of the high country landscape.

            The young journalist came to Vantage in 1921 searching for his deceased mother’s identity, but fell in love with a beautiful young Irish girl and left the valley in frustration, finding neither his mother’s story nor a successful completion of courtship of Kelley.  The girl is stubborn in her love for the valley even as she faces a need to answer the journalist.

            Some violence, explicit sex.

About the Author

Eldridge Trott was born in the sand-hill, shinnery-oak country of Central Texas, but spent his teen years among the mesquites and catclaws of West Texas.  Work War II carried him westward and became a character-devining event in his adult life.  After a session at the University of Missouri journalism school, following the war, he polished his writing skills as an editor-publisher of a California weekly neswpaper.  The newspaper busin ess ended for Trott when he became a journalism instructor at a California community college in 1969, where he remained until retirement.

            During the journalism stretch, he started a successful career writing children’s stories.  He held a long-term interest in western history, leading to a first novel, “Gathering at Vantage.”

            In addition to his interest in western history, he became an ardent backpacker, and began a decades-long exploration of the California Sierra Nevada.  A frequent companion with Trott during his backpacking adventures was the black terrior, Sweetie.

            In addition to his degree from the University of Missouri, Trott also holds degrees from mcMurry University, Abilene, Texas, and a M.A. Degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

            Trott and his wife, Lois, who suffers from dementia, live in the edge of the Plumas National Forest, near the small town of Greenville, California.

            Trott is currently planning a book on his wife, based on her notes over a long period.  It will also deal with the issue of dementia.