As a doctor, Santiago Toole must treat the cowboys who had been shot on a cattle drive through Miles City; as a sheriff, he must investigate the shootings.

Gladstone Brass found out how to make his livelihood during the thirty years he prospected the arid wastes of the Nevada desert. He pried ore out of the few little deposits he discovered, then went to town -- which he hated -- only long enough to trade his bits of gold for the supplies he needed. Otherwise he was devoted to keeping these arid, secret wastes all to himself, and that meant driving out rivals, invaders, interlopers, and adventurers....

"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"--

Down the Eastern slopes of the Rockies, out upon the Great Plains, and into the heart of Blackfoot country flows the Two Medicine River. To this wild and beautiful land come a pair of young wanderers, half-breeds born of two worlds, but belonging to neither. Marie Therese de Paris, driven by the ancestral fires in her spirit, sets out on a vision quest, hoping to save the Blackfoot Indians from their cruel fate. Peter Kipp, bold and ambitious, chooses...

"The story of a vaudeville troupe that makes its way to Western mining towns"--

"A widow must defend herself and her property from the greedy townsfolk of Marysville, Montana"--

When three people need to leave Virginia City, they face a jarring stagecoach ride across the plains toward Salt Lake through an area infested with ruthless road agents.