October, 1891. Butte, Montana. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and balladmaker, but also a doper, a drinker and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the devout mine captain Long Anthony...

Will Andrews drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere and full of restless men looking for ways to make money. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with a man who convinces him to fund an expedition to track down buffalo in the Colorado Rockies.

John Russell has been raised as an Apache. Now he's on his way to live as a white man. But when the stagecoach passengers learn who he is, they want nothing to do with him. That is, until outlaws ride down on them and they must rely on Russell's guns and his ability to lead them out of the desert.

My name is Yip Tolroy and I am a mute. I have made not a sound since the day of my birth, October 2nd, 1815. I have led a life filled with wonder and misery both. Fatherless and friendless, at fourteen years old Yip is no more than chest-high to anyone in his small town, a slate and chalk his only way of talking. Everyone stares, but nobody thinks he has anything to say. But then gold is discovered nearby, and Yip commits a grievous crime. In the...

Sam Cotton is the last person anyone in the New Mexico town of Hope would have suspected of wrongdoing. All that changes, however, when he is seen riding away hell for leather from a scene of robbery and death. Though the victims' families save him from a lynching, once the judge arrives in town, Sam will stand trial for his life - with only his father believing in his innocence...

Western Ukraine, 1930. Luka's village has managed to remain hidden from the advancing Soviet brutality & labour camp deportations. But everything changes when a stranger arrives, pulling a sled bearing the bodies of 2 children. The stranger is lynched, despite Luka's protests. Then the mob leader discovers his daughter has vanished.

England, late 1930s, and Alice Wright - restless, stifled - makes an impulsive decision to marry wealthy American Bennett van Cleve and leave her home and family behind. But stuffy, disapproving Baileyville, Kentucky, where her husband favours work over his wife, and is dominated by his overbearing father, is not the adventure - or the escape - that she hoped for. That is, until she meets Margery O'Hare - daughter of a notorious felon and a troublesome...

Through a vivid and dramatic interrogation of the past, this work examines and illuminates the nature of Western civilization from its earliest incarnations.

It begins in the office of The Hat Creek Cattle Company of the Rio Grande. It ends as a journey into the heart of every adventurer who ever lived.