A graduate student, conducting research on the Crow Reservation in Wyoming for her PhD, discovers a sketch on a piece of old birch bark that may show the location of gold hidden more than 100 years earlier by a Crow chief. When Beth Richardsons niece, who lives with the graduate student, goes missing, Parker Williams joins Beth in a desperate search throughout Yellowstone National Park to find her. The shooting of a Yellowstone security official and two murders in Yellowstone complicate the search and bring bizarre twists and turns that culminate in confronting a foundation of the American justice system with ethical and legal questions.

A history of the Bozeman Trail, which led to the goldfields of Montana, begins with the creation of the Trail in 1862 and follows the events of 1863 through 1868, during which it was followed by prospectors seeking their fortunes, as well as the gamblers, highwaymen, "professional women", and merchants who sought to capitalize on the miner's needs and vices; facing hostile Indians, hard climates, and wilderness solitude along the way.

Collected here for the first time ever are the surviving eyewitness accounts of the Bozeman's Trail's civilian emigrants: twenty-four diaries written during the journey and nine reminiscences prepared afterward. These accounts describe life on the West's last great emigrant trail, the shortcut from the Platte River Road to the Montana goldfields, from 1863 until 1866, when the route was closed by "Red Cloud's War." Ample introductions, extensive annotation, historical illustrations, and detailed maps enrich this oversized, two-volume compendium.

Perry A. Burgess, son of Abram Burgess and Emma Semantha Cheney, was born in 1843 in Nauvoo, Illinois. He married Annie Mapes in 1870. They had three children. He died in 1900 in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.