A three-generation ""true story"" of the expansion of business and frontier life in Kansas and the Oklahoma Territory, which covers events connecting buffalo hunting in 1871 with Dusenbergs and tommy guns during Prohibition. Jake Kincaid, at first a likable wheeler-dealer with his eye forever fixed on future investments, rises from lonely hunter to gaming-house owner to real-estate sharpie to budding oil baron. But along the way he loses his wife (by Caesarean) and two sons, neither of whom much care about money. Son Owen gives up business to become a lawman, and young Brad turns bankrobber. Will Owen shoot Brad? Eventually he winds up with Brad's Indian wife as his mistress. Owen's son Morgan inherits granddad's rowdy streak and his penchant for the buck, and at last finds himself avenging Owen's death at the hands of a mobster. Believable characters and a swift hard plot, somewhat delayed by the mythic-skies-forked-with-prairie-lightning-prose.