Alton Pryor has published fifty-plus books since turning 70 in 1997-many of them about California's past and the colorful characters who rode our trails to fame or infamy. To date he has sold more than 180,000-plus copies of his first book, "Little Known Tales in California History", and has done respectably well with most of his other titles. But until fate derailed his 33-year journalism career, he never aspired to write a book, and certainly never anticipated he would come to be regarded as "Mr. Self-Publishing" by his peers in the Sacramento area. "I would have liked living in the Old West," he says. "I wanted, at one time, to be a really good cowboy. I had horses as a young man and even took a raw colt and trained it to work cattle." But, by the time Pryor was born on March 19, 1927, the era of gunslingers and gold miners was over, and he started life, instead, on his family's farm outside of King City in the Salinas Valley. He was terminated after writing for 27 years for a magazine. The magazine was sold to a midwest firm. Pryor turned to writing books and says now, "I wish I had been fired 20 years earlier."