Porter Ross was a young man with guile, but little honor. He searched for life's seams of passage - the next easy path - requiring only oily charm and larceny, sans noble purpose. Imprisoned for bar brawling, he acquired a pardon by enlisting on behalf of the Union cause in the civil war. He escaped that war by promising a friend he would deliver a liberated slave family to a free-town in Wisconsin. Listed as missing in action, he then escaped toward the lawless western frontier. Young men, boys really, north and south, barely out of adolescence, had been lured and eventually drafted from their homes and families, and then pressed into an abstract civil cause. They were trained to shoot, burn, and kill other American boys. Dispirited, families shattered, friends buried in poorly marked graves, without work, and largely impoverished, thousands of those discharged survivors would spill west toward an ungoverned wilderness. And scattering before them were displaced native peoples, skilled horsemen, with new weapons and long memories.