In this tale, people scattered throughout the world are woven together in the valleys of the Rocky Mountains. Forty years after Napoleon's defeat, the development of modern warfare on the Crimean Peninsula sends reverberations across the globe, alerting all of the growth in technology, the precursor of the US Civil War in weapons and tactics, as well as the needs of multitudes of dispossessed and underrepresented. The shrinking planet is growing crowded. The bumping into one another becomes increasingly violent. Women and men stand to be counted, molded of numerous talents and abilities, striving for relief and equality, demanding rights and opportunity. Slavery, reservations, women's suffrage, polygamy, and Manifest Destiny are swirled into the murky vat of the United States. Protesting members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known derisively as Mormons, are challenged over religious freedom. Despite the continued criticism heaped upon them for their unique doctrines, missionary work and its effects spread throughout the nation and the earth.

The 1850s see the homeland of Deseret plowing against Bloody Kansas, Buchannan's Blunder, Mountain Meadows, the Sevastopol Policy, the Pony Express, and the Transcontinental Telegraph. These ventures combine with similar troubles and shove the nation into the red-hot furnace of civil war.

Olsen, Jeffery W.

Jeffery W. Olsen was born in 1954 in Salt Lake City, has six siblings, and enjoys a rich and varied heritage. After a botched Ulpanim trip to Israel in 1972, underestimating the effects of the Munich Olympics, he served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for two years in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. He returned home and married Sylvia Lee Rost, a native of Nevada, in 1976, and they are the parents of five children. Most of his life has been spent in western Nevada, where he graduated from UNR, then at times ranged through the deserts and mountains, the benefactor of celestial tolerance and erudition.