Jack Crawford (1847-1917) entertained a generation of Americans and introduced them to their frontier heritage. A master storyteller who presented the West as he experienced it, he was one of America's most popular performers in the late nineteenth century.

Dressed in buckskin with a wide-brimmed sombrero covering his flowing locks, Crawford delivered a frontier monologue and medley that, as one New York City journalist reported, held his audience spell-bound for two hours by a simple narration of his life.

In this biography, Darlis Miller re-creates his experiences as a scout, rancher, miner, reformer, husband and father, and poet and entertainer to reinterpret the American Dream and the lure of getting rich pursued by many during the Gilded Age.