"A Roaring in the Wind," Robert Lewis Taylor's 14th book, is described on its cover as a novel as well as a "History of Alder Gulch, Montana." But unfortunately it falls far short in both categories. At best it is a fitfully interesting miscellany of vignettes and facts about frontier life…. Taylor, with a weakness for mere cataloguing, does little to shape his material or to pace the accumulation of incidents. It takes more than 100 pages for him just to reach Alde...

Historical fiction buffs may find ["A Roaring in the Wind"] somewhat of a disappointment. Taylor's description of life in frontier gold rush towns is lively and entertaining, but his plot and character development leave something to be desired…. Looking for adventure, a young man … finds himself a part of the rough mining towns of preterritorial Montana. His description of the people and places he encounters reads like a cross between the rollicking humor of Mark Twain�...

A Roaring in the Wind, one more work about the Old West, with all the usual clichés and overworked situations and characters, simply didn't seem very promising. But Taylor has done a good job. The extensive bibliography merely suggests that he has done his homework (or at least looked up book titles); the novel itself suggests that he has been able to transform the deadness of facts into the life of fiction in a manner that may well win him the same acclaim that his The Travels of Jaimie McPhe...