"The first adequate history of the High Country Empire I have ever found...This is vivid, vigorous history, rich with incident, solid with research, firm with informed opinion...On total score this is an outstanding book."--Hal Borland, Saturday Review. "It will make excellent supplementary reading for students of the American West, complementing the work of Bernard De Voto and Carl F. Kraenzel."--Walter Prescott Webb, New York Times Book Review. "Mr. Athearn is not only a good historian, he is an exceptionally able writer. His sparkling narrative--filled with quotable anecdotes and general perceptive insights--is a delight to read."--Gene M. Gressley, Library Journal. "This is a complex, many-sided story, and the author ...somehow manages to hold it down to reasonable length and at the same time retain much of the variety and color inherent in his theme."--Oscar Lewis, New York Herald Tribune Book Review. "A very great mass of scholarly knowledge expands, illuminates, and makes all alive within the major framework, and Dr. Athearn writes with power and charm and is never pedestrian or pedantic."--San Francisco Chronicle. "Professor Athearn's depth of historical knowledge and perspective ties the story of this high country empire together so that it is socially and economically meaningful and at the same time entertaining."--Harlan Trott, Christian Science Monitor.