Illuminating both the ancient and more recent history of the plains and eastern Rocky Mountains, West creates a tapestry interlaced with environmental, social, and military history. He treats the "frontier" not as a morally loaded term, either in the traditional celebratory sense or the more recent critical judgment, but as a powerfully unsettling process that shattered an old world. He shows how Indians, goldseekers, haulers, merchants, ranchers, and farmers all contributed to and in turn were consumed by this process, even as the plains themselves were utterly transformed by the clash of cultures and competing visions.