Book excerpt: Publisher description: The Monte Cristo area, pocketed in spectacularly beautiful mountains in the Pacific Northwest, has long intrigued visitors with its colorful history, rooted in the search for deposits of gold and silver as rich as the Count of Monte Cristo. Here is the story of the region, from discovery to disillusionment and, ultimately, to the dust of a ghost town. The several decades of Monte Cristo's glory led to the construction of the Everett & Monte Cristo Railway (a marvelous engineering mistake) and the founding of the city of Everett as a processing and shipping point for the projected mining riches all events manipulated by Eastern corporate titans including John D. Rockefeller and the Guggenheims. Through boom and bust the struggling railroaders, miners, merchants, and their families dreamed, worked, failed, and sometimes died in Monte Cristo's unforgiving winters.