A rip-roaring history beginning four centuries ago with two tough but credulous Spaniards who had heard the natives talking about gold. The French explorers Marquette and Joliet, La Salle and De Tonty carry on the tale. But the big news breaks sometime after the middle of the last century when men begin to strike it rich near Leadville and Cripple Creek and out of the wealth and violence of the mining fields rise fabulous figures--Horace Austin Warner Tabor, David Moffat and Winfield Scott Stratton. The Arkansas looms out of the Royal Gorge and follows a more peaceful course across the Kansas plains. Its history is no longer gold and silver but cattle. Dodge City became the northern terminus of the cattle trail, and at one time half a million Texas longhorns milled through its stockyards in a year. The buffalo hunters vied with the cattle men in making it the toughest town in the west. And when the big cattle days were over, the land rush came, and the boom towns, and Tulsa and oil, and the bitterness and suffering of the sharecroppers in the Arkansas cotton fields. But in the Ozarks the mountaineers cherish their age-old customs and lore, and by Arkansas firesides stories are still told of Davy Crockett, and Zebulon Pike, and Zachary Taylor and the great Sam Houston, and in Little Rock old people will still speak of the better days before the war (and they don't mean this war or the last one!) -- Book jacket.

HIghborn brook -- Elusive Golconda -- The Pikes Peak hoax -- "This here is California!" -- Lead carbonates -- Lawless Leadville -- Royal Gorge war -- Love and ruin -- Cripple Creek -- Colorado civil wars -- Meat on Friday, melons and dust -- Western Kansas -- Great white paternalism -- From whence to where? -- The Ozarks -- Grand Duchy of Arkansas -- Forty years, three flags -- Pistols at dawn -- Gunpowder and hyperbole -- Carpetbags and crime -- Rambunctious river -- "Now laugh, god damn you" -- Lynching and sharecroppers -- River's end.