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.

Silk banners and stone dragons, dusty corrals and saddle leather-the North China plains of the warlords meets the cowboy culture of Western America in the years before World War II. Fred Barton led this extraordinary adventure and enterprise to supply horses for the feudal warlords, and only cowboys recruited from the ranches and rodeo arenas of the Western states had the skill to herd thousands of horses across Siberia, Mongolia, to China. Yet Fred Barton himself remains enigmatic...a cowboy, adventurer, promoter, who had his eyes on many prizes. Barton not only took his version of the Old West to Russia and China, but also to Hollywood at a time when the motion picture industry was constructing a myth of the Old West just as open range cowboy life was disappearing. This Montana bronc buster deliberately obscured parts of his life. Along the way, Barton became part of the network of unofficial U.S. intelligence in the Far East, bred a new type of horse, and tirelessly defended the values of the open range cowboy. His legacy lives on, affecting world events today, as told in this illustrated biography.