This humorous, non-fiction account follows the rise, fall, and foibles of the lumber company that floated the last raft of logs down the Mississippi in mid-twentieth century. Helle Lumber Company of Savanna, Illinois, enjoyed a cast of Midwestern "characters" and classic american entrepreneurial misadventures. The book captures a time when chainsaws and other inventions changed a way of life during the logging of the great Mississippi bottoms.

In the years before World War I, Montana cowboy Fred Barton was employed by Czar Nicholas II to help establish a horse ranch--the largest in the world--in Siberia to supply the Russian military. Barton later assembled a group of American rodeo stars and drove horses across Mongolia for the war-lords of northern China, creating a 250,000 acre ranch in Shanxi Province. Along the way, Barton became part of an unofficial U.S. intelligence network in the Far East, bred a new type of horse from Russian, Mongolian and American stock and promoted the lifestyle of the open range cowboy. Returning...