The recollections and yarns, historical meditations and reportage brought together in Mountain Blood display a sensibility formed by the harsh, outlandishly beautiful terrain of the American West. Will Baker's tales range from Nebraska to Peru and tell of a boy's first trout, a bar brawl over a woman, and the vise-like grip of gold over all of the Americas. They spring from an imagination shaped by wild, circuitous mealtime stories of prospectors and from the bitter history of a place where suburban ranch houses dot the vast sweep of land once hunted by the Lakotah.

WILL BAKER (1935-2005) was a professor of English at the University of California, Davis. His books include Backward: An Essay on Indians, Time, and Photography and Tony and the Cows: A True Story from the Range Wars.