"On his graduation from Harvard, Jay Warren, son of a self-made rich man, receives a ticket to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and five hundred dollars with instructions to find himself and shape his own destiny. He hopes to find Easy Street, but instead has some brutal lessons and plenty of opportunity to succeed or to destroy himself"--

In 1841, a St. Louis businessman had a dream: to open up the far reaches of the Yellowstone River and commerce with native tribes. So Guy Strauss put together a team of adventurers led by a half-civilized mountain man named Broken Leg Fitzhugh. The plan was to set up a trading post on the edge of a land he knew. Yet from the very beginning, the expedition was buffeted by disaster, plunging the men of the Rocky Mountain Trading Company into a desperate...

At the beginning it looked as if Randy and Linda Van Pelt would have the most wonderful married life together. They had a perfect Montana ranch and the best stock of bulls, but their newlywed bliss was not destined to last. Randy died of pneumonia after their first hard winter and Linda, a transplanted Easterner, found herself alone in a desolate country. Linda turned for help to her neighbor, a horse trainer named Canada Parker. After Canada buried...

After her husband dies, her son is killed and her house is burned to the ground, mine owner March McPhee, targeted by the wealthy and powerful, fights back with the help of a saloon man, an assayer and a slippery lawyer, but wonders if wealth of any sort should be defended at such a price.

August Beausoleil and his colleague, Charles Pomerantz, have taken the Beausoleil Brothers Follies to the remote mining towns of Montana, far from the powerful impresarios who own the talent and control the theaters on the big vaudeville circuits. Their cast includes a collection of has-beens and second-tier performers: Mary Mabel Markey, once queen of the boards but now a little out of breath; Wayne Windsor, "The Profile, " who favors his audiences...