Daniel Boone's spelling of Missouri reflects this rampaging river and the violent years of the 19th century's final half. Steamboats brave its currents and John Brown and Southern belle Susan McCausland are caught in up the Kansas border wars. A black freedman, a half-blood Indian teacher and Hutterite immigrants all wrestle with forces they scarcely understand. Good-seeker Fannie Kelly meets Sitting Bull and Chief Joseph"s story comes to a close. Teddy Roosevelt builds a ranch, James J. Hill builds a railroad, and a New England poet tries to rebuild shattered relationships after Wounded Knee. South Dakota History said the author "writes eloquently".

With their sensitive eye for natural beauties, the Indians called their river The Moonshell. When the French explorers first poled up its waters, taking note of its sandbars and shallowness, they renamed it, quite aptly but unexcitingly, The Platte ('flat' in French). Since that time, hundreds of thousands of pioneers have boated, tracked, traversed and cursed the Platte en route to their destinations or fates in the Rockies and the Far West.