No writer is better than Charles King, here with his first offering of the 20th century, at bringing the reader more vividly and realistically into the life of a U. S. Army soldier during the late-19th-early-20th century. Because of his personal experience as an officer in the conflicts of that period, he not only gets the historical details correct, but also the settings, moods, and day-to-day life, including the personal, romantic, financial, and family life of the soldiers living on those far-flung military posts along the western frontier.
In Spite of Foes; or, Ten Tears' Trial is more autobiographical than most of his novels. Like the hero in the novel, his experience started with the Indian wars of the American West; like the hero, he witnessed the great railway strikes of the 1890s which the Army was controversially called upon to subdue; like the hero, he was sent to the Philippine-American War in charge of state militiamen and promoted to the rank of general. There is a lot of American history to cover in this one fictionalized autobiography, which makes this novel a little longer than some of his others; but the reader is nevertheless, as usual, left wanting more when the reading is finished.
Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing. We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison. Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book. While remaining faithful to a writer's original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes. If the printer became distracted after placing an 'a' at the end of a line and then placed another 'a' at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too? Not us. That's why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.
