This is a sprawling history of a nation built on the sweat and ambition of inventors, adventurers, and people searching for a new beginning in the mid-19th century. As readers see America change over the decades, they witness the role of the gun in preserving life, defending families and upholding law and order at a time when nothing in life was simple. With the turn of the century we follow this tale of adventure and innovation into the early 1900s, and the end of a way of life, the end of the Wild West and the American Cowboy of a bygone era.