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“George Black rediscovers the history and lore of one of the planet’s most magnificent landscapes. Read Empire of Shadows, and you’ll never think of our first -- in many ways our greatest -- national park in the same way again.”
—Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder

Columns of boiling water shooting 100 feet into the air? Underground explosions shaking the earth like distant artillery? Fish swimming in both directions in the same river, some bound for the Atlantic and others for the Pacific?

For nineteenth-century pioneers, adventurers, and scientists, the valley of the upper Yellowstone was the most mysterious and myth-laden corner of the western frontier, and the urge to explore it became an obsession. But before these men could reach their goal, the frontier had to be settled and "civilized," and the hostile tribes that blocked the paths to the great volcanic caldera had to be brought to heel.

In his latest book, OnEarth executive editor George Black tells the dramatic story of Yellowstone through the lives of the driven, ambitious, and often ruthless men who created the world's first national park, like the former vigilante leader Nathaniel Pitt Langford, the park's first superintenden, and the cavalry officer Cheyney Doane, who yearned to be recognized as America’s greatest explorer.

Weaving together the grand themes of exploration, idealism, and violence, Empire of Shadows is a beautifully written reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century West that will forever change the way we think about one of America's most iconic places.