Escalante Canyon is a red-walled hole in a geologic uplift (the Uncompahgre Plateau) in western Colorado. Pioneers surging west fell into this canyon hole the way gold nuggets get caught in the potholes of a stream. Like nuggets eddying against stone, they were shaped by the Canyon--rounded off, shattered, or tossed away, according to how they conformed or resisted. Indeed, treasure richer than gold settled into that hole in time; in the onrushing current of history the lifestyle--the Old West--settled and still survives there--in fact, in artifact, and in living memories. The tale of the canyon is a tale of struggle, change, frontier friendship, and enmity that is part of the story of the West itself: Anglo settlement; conflict between cowman, nester, and sheep man; epidemics; hardships; loneliness. Many of its stories, though, are tantalizing episodes unique to this place, laced with oddity and tragedy.

Using as digging tools the camera, tape recorder, diaries, memoirs, and a hundred years of old newspapers, Marshall has mined more gold than the first prospectors ever suspected lay in that mysterious red hole.