Focusing on pivotal figures as George Catlin, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Tom Mix, this book traces the rise and fall of a popular entertainment shaped out of the ""raw material of America". It is an American entertainment that is of interest to a public, hovering uncertainly between industrial progress and nostalgia for a romanticized past.

A uniquely American entertainment - colorful, energetic, unabashed, and, as Reddin demonstrates, self-made - the "Wild West show" exerted an appeal that was all but irresistible to a public hovering uncertainly between industrial progress and nostalgia for a romanticized past.