The decades of the 1870s and 1880s were the heyday of the Old West as the world has come to know it in stories and songs, plays, motion pictures, and television dramas. Edgar Beecher Bronson, the real-life prototype of that now familiar character, the tenderfoot from the East, went out where the West began when it began. When he took his first herd of cattle north of the North Platte River, he went into an area "of roughly three hundred thousand square miles which] held no white man's habitation save the little camp of miners in the Black Hills, and had for its only tenant nomad bands of...