PROLOGUE

YOU COULD, IF YOU selected your sites carefully, detonate a hundred A-bombs in The Great Basin Desert without knocking over a man-made structure.  The Great Basin is a vast wasteland in the American West—a quarter of a million square miles of ravines, plateaus, and mountain ranges populated by sagebrush and saltbrush, juniper and piñion.  Skittering across the scalded alkaline earth are jackrabbits, cottontails, ground squirrels, and pikas—rock rabbits or coneys—which resemble rodents but are not.  Rangy coyotes pursue these mammals like sloppily-dressed detectives.  Birds of prey dive-bomb them from the air.  Golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, prairie falcons, and the burrowing owls feed on the small mammals and smaller birds, and also on the pack and kangaroo rats, lizards, and snakes.  Larger hunters like mountain lions, foxes, and bobcats join the hunt, the largest of which can bring down mule deer and the occasional bighorn sheep.  The warfare continues at the micro level among the insects and arachnids.  The desert is a savage battlefield with red-dripping teeth and fangs.

If the land shapes its human inhabitants, as anthropologists claim, it is no wonder the story of the settlers of the American West is stereotyped by its drifters, gunfighters, whores, and gamblers, peppered with a smattering of honest sodbusters, cattlemen, and sheep men.  The earliest invaders fought not only the native peoples of the desert, but each other—mirroring the carnage among the animal denizens.  Human inhabitants of the desert west are red in their own way; fiercely independent, the reddest of the red states are here.  New-fangled zoning laws are voted down here.  Hippies please use side entrance (there is no side entrance).  Minding your business is your business.

The Great Basin’s Salt Lake Basin was the perfect place to hatch one of the strangest desert critters ever—a breed of men with an exaggerated taste for, well, women.  They instituted The Practice—the practice of polygamy.  Polygamy today continues among upwards of 50,000 people among the brush and ravines of the Western deserts, including not only the Great Basin but also the Mojave and the Mexican Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts. The Practice was maintained by its own red principle: the principle of blood atonement.  Perhaps it was a principle learned from observing the desert bloodletting.

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The Big Horn Basin viewed from LANDSAT a thousand miles above, is shaped like a drop of blood splashed over the Rocky Mountains from the Great Basin Pool. Cartographers and gazetteers can’t settle on how to spell Big Horn; is it the Bighorn Basin, Bighorn River, and Bighorn Mountains or Big Horn Basin, River, and Mountains.  All, however, agree on the official spelling of Big Horn County.  Though not technically a part of the Great Basin, no matter how you spell it, the Big Horn Basin is in every respect like the rest of the Great Basin, including the Practice and the Principle.  Blood runs freely there as well.