The Rancher

In the autumn of 1881, Elias Harlan rides into Blackfeet country with one good horse and a bill of sale for land that has belonged to other people for ten thousand years. Two winters later, the buffalo are gone and the people who depended on them are starving in their lodges.

Between those two moments lies a country breaking. Elias learns the work of the high plains-the spring calving, the winter grass, the arithmetic of a herd that survives or doesn't. He takes a grulla mare from a Lakota m...