This rich and authoritative chronicle of the Yellowstone Basin covers a span of more than a century and half, from the 1740s, when the Verendryé brothers were seeking a route to the Western Sea, to the late nineteenth century and the days of the settlers who turned the prairie sod "wrong side up."

Here are names that have lived in history—William Clark, John Colter, Jedediah Smith, Custer, Crook, Terry—and others not so familiar: François Antoine Larocque, who explored the Yellowstone well in advance of Clark; Woman Chief, the Gros Ventre girl who became a renowned warrior; the shadowy outlaws of the Hole-in-the-Wall country of the Big Horns. Famous and infamous, renowned and obscure, the Indians, the trappers, the military, the cowboys, the vigilantes, the settlers are portrayed not as isolated figures but in relation to, and within, the history of this dramatic region.