While shelves are filled with accounts of industry titans, politicians, and exalted military leaders, this is a tale of an estranged young man making his way in a hard, cold, and often cruel world. Escaping a dull future with little meaning, he follows the example of his childhood hero and comes west into the Kansas Territory to seek his fortune. He first joins a freighting company down the Santa Fe Trail and then returns to the turbulent "Bleeding Kansas." The long miles are marked by countless graves, scoured by Indians, and fought over by two bitterly opposed political factions. Often discouraged, he must thread his way through these obstacles, and he concludes that he could use a little divine inspiration.