The place is a tiny town in the vast Dakota territory. Into it rides a nightmare gunslinger, butchering, raping, burning. When he leaves, the town and the lives of the survivors are in ruins--and this is but a prologue to the cruel carnage to come, as a woman dedicates herself body and soul to vengeance, and uses her strength and her weakness to turn men into her weapons of destruction. E.L. Doctorow creates a fearsome frontier, one that pushes back the frontiers of fiction. He peoples it with a cast of characters that includes whores and saints, killers and healers, mad Russians, silent Swedes, and gifted Native Americans to richly illuminate and reveal the West as it was and as it still mirrors an America born of its striving and savagery. This is E.L. Doctorow's first novel. Had he written no others, it alone would have marked him as one of the major writers of our time.