Trader, stockman, and raconteur, Johnny Grant (1831-1907) lived "very close to trouble" on the wide open Montana/Idaho frontier of the mid-nineteenth century. A key pioneer of western Montana, Grant is memorialized today by the Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site, operated by the National Park Service at Deer Lodge, Montana. His memoir brings to life the chiefs, warriors, traders, and ranchmen of the 1840s-1850s, and the miners, merchants, settlers, soldiers, and road agents who surged into the Bitterroots and northern Rockies with the gold strikes of the 1860s.