The seven stories in this book are fictional, yet they capture the brutally real, the ridiculously funny, and the often painfully sad experiences of 19th century miners in Nevada and California. The eyewitness narrator, Old Floyd, tells the tales using the bawdy humor and unbridled hyperbole typical of American folklore. Although the stores can be read simply as amusing and entertaining frontier adventures, they also provide a satiric view of economic and political conditions in our present century. Old Floyd's tales are the amazing, astonishing, mysterious, suspenseful, dramatic, tragic, comic, poignant, pedantic, enigmatic, and almost true stories of Comstock miners.