Trap Of Gold Theme

The use of a gigantic mountain and John Wetherton are important factors in developing the theme“ There is a fine line between greed and satisfaction” in Trap of Gold written by Louis L’Amour. Trap of Gold a short story about a poor man named Wetherton, searching for gold in an alluvial fan and comes upon a vein of gold and risks his life trying to get it. The Mountain develops the theme of the story by forcing Wetherton to make a life altering decision. L’amour portrays the mountain as a character by treating it as the antagonist of the story. The mountain acts as the antagonist by luring Wetherton into a high risk high reward situation. The first reason the setting is important it is the object that makes him decide between greed and satisfaction.

Wetherton is extremely poor man that wants“an easier life in a larger town” and this influences his decision immensely to be more greedy. John Wetherton is a smart man and when he finds the mountain he makes camp a distance away and can handle the anticipation but when the gold gets better “ his steps grew quicker and he returned more reluctantly” he risks his life in greed. One of the ways he tries to handle greed is attempting to set goals on how much gold he is going to take. This plan backfires and the greed overtakes him. In the same matter Wetherton is a hard worker in all aspects of gold extraction. When he is first digging in the mine it is beneficial, but when he gets deeper in the mountain “ he had taken out more than a thousand dollars worth of gold”. It drove him more into greed because he knew it was there and he could get larger amounts of gold as he went farther down. Furthermore Wetherton is also very adventurous, gold miners have the curiosity of looking for gold in any way it could be found. He shows this by climbing the alluvial fan and being more than 2,000 feet in the air. This helps Wetherton because he ended up finding the mountain and creating the situation of greed and