After the Civil War, thousands of veterans swarmed into the West, searching for a new life. Fifteen-year-old Grayson Beauvais comes with his father to find gold in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory. There he encounters a West that’s both like and unlike the West of TV and movies, and both friendship and unreasoning enmity between people of different ethnic backgrounds. And there he plays a part n George Hearst’s founding of the Homestake Mining Company that becomes the largest gold mine in the Americas….