The American frontier in the 1700s produced some men of utter ruthlessness, and Jim Girty was one of the worst. Living among the Delaware Indians in the Ohio Valley, Girty and his brothers incited acts of savagery and war against the white settlers.

One of Jim Girty's targets was the Village of Peace, a settlement of Christian Indians who had been converted by Moravian missionaries. Girty and his ruffians, playing on the fear and hostility of surrounding tribes, incited them to gather at the village, where they threw the ominous war club on the ground.

Lewis Wetzel, a lonely, taciturn hunter whose family had been the victim of Delaware atrocities, swore revenge on Girty. The intrepid Wetzel, called "Deathwind" by the Delawares, had saved Fort Henry from Indian attack, but was he any match for the odious Girty?

Zane Grey (1872-1939), born in Ohio, was practicing dentistry in New York when he and his wife published his first novel themselves. Grey presented the West as a moral battleground, in which his characters are destroyed because of their inability to change or be redeemed through a final confrontation with their past. The man whose name is synonymous with Westerns made his first trip west in 1907, at age thirty-five. Motion picture rights brought in a fortune, with 109 films based on his work.