Desert Dust

Set in Wyoming Territory in the summer of 1868, this Western follows a young Easterner who leaves New York State on his physicians’ advice, hoping the high, dry air will mend his health. He rides the rails to the end of the line, a raw construction town thrown up where the Union Pacific is still laying track. On the train he falls in with a striking woman bound for the same place, and their uneasy acquaintance runs alongside his slow, hard schooling in a settlement crowded with gamblers, saloons, Mormon emigrants, and Sioux country just beyond. Edwin L. Sabin, a careful chronicler of the frontier, turns the boomtown chaos of the transcontinental railroad into a story about a greenhorn learning what the West actually costs.