The Golden Chance

by Theodore V. Olsen

The discovery of gold pits half-Indian Gage Cameron against the powerful and ruthless rancher R. B. Janeece and his brutal nephew, Thad. Original.

Genres: Westerns

151 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published September 23, 1992

About the author

Theodore Victor Olsen (April 25, 1932 in Rhinelander, Wisconsin – July 13, 1993 in Rhinelander) was an American western fiction author.

Olsen's family immigrated from Norway in 1901. Theodore Olsen was born on April 25, 1932 in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. He went to school in Rhinelander and began to write in high school. He began a western novel at that time. Olsen went to college in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. He finally finished his novel, Haven of the Hunted, and it was published in 1956. Olsen also began to sell western stories to pulp magazines at this time. Though Olsen would occasionally travel west, he lived his whole life in Rhinelander and would use exhaustive research to help accurately portray scenes of the west in his stories.

Olsen was married to fellow western fiction author Beverly Butler.

Olsen died in Rhinelander on July 13, 1993, and several works were published posthumously.

Much of T.V. Olsen's family still lives in the Rhinelander region. They own a 300-acre (1.2 sq km) ranch with a century old farm house and dairy barn.

Reviews

[Jeff Tankersley · Rating 2 out of 5]

The halfbreed Gage Cameron is desperately clinging to a collapsing rockface, having accidentally broke through some crumbling clay on the high rim of a steep canyon, trying now to climb down to safety when three white cowboys on the other side of the canyon are laughing at him and shooting around him unsportingly. When Gage finally makes it to the river below, alive but bruised and cut up, and after the three troublemakers ride off happily in their mean amusement, he finds that there is gold in the river.

"The Golden Chance" won a Spur Award in 1992 and has a standard protagonist in Gage Cameron, young and trying to find his way in a family that has its own problems, and with neighbors exhibiting various shades of good and bad, but the author Olsen mostly just sets race as the determining factor. The white guys are bad, the black folks are good, the other Indians are used by the whites, and Gage's half-white half-Navajo family is both good and bad.

Verdict: A short, easy western with a steady plot and adventure/survival tale but with odd pacing. Blocks of the narrative go unaddressed for extended time periods and an odd racial comeuppance undercurrent leave this one more odd than interesting.

Jeff's Rating: 2 / 5 (Okay)
movie rating if made into a movie: R

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

Perhaps the worst Western I have ever had the misfortune of reading. I threw it out after I had finished it to protect others from potentially wasting their time reading it.