The U. P. Trail

A frontier narrative follows surveyors and a small caravan as they cross the plains and Wyoming hills, tracing efforts to find a railroad pass and the hazards of desert and mountain travel. Hostile terrain, scarce water, encampments, Sioux scouts, and tensions within a party led by a gold-laden miner named Bill Horn create continual peril. Alternating vivid landscape description and episodic action, the narrative examines the engineering challenges of constructing a western railway, encounters between different peoples, and the survival instincts and moral choices demanded by violence, isolation, and the lure of fortune.