The First Pioneers who settled among the rocks and sage and the stunted cedars and huge, gray hills of Idaho came by ox-cart and on foot. It was no place for weak-souled or weak-bodied men and women. It was no place for those who dreamed of money fortunes. The tough and keen-eyed men and women who stayed knew they were there to carve a home, however modest, out of the inhospitable land, and they built their log cabins and raised their children amid a ceaseless struggle to keep their stomachs fill and their bodies fit.
But even in that sparsely-populated, pioneer land there were some who couldn’t play the game straight; there were some who found it necessary to fight to uphold their ideals and their property; there were some who found romance. This is the story of a few of them; Billy Louise, whose whole young life had been spent along the banks of the Wolverine; Ward Warren, who was making a lonely comeback; Charlie Fox, fresh from a job in an Eastern bank; Samuel Seabeck, whose principles, both business and moral, made him hate rustlers; and a handful of others.
The story of these people is a story of the development of the American West. It is also the story of things which mattered to the pioneers; their land and cattle; their friends and lovers; their enemies, both human and animal.
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