Decades after its release in 1975, James Gray’s trademark energetic prose pulsates with the essence of this flamboyant era when idealism ran rampant across the prairies. Gray captures the: Political frustrations of the farmers and the resulting turbulent Progressive movement and the resulting Wheat Pools, Radical idealism of the One Big Union, born after the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919, Gambling fever that struck not only Western Canadians, but all North Americans, spawned by those who put their paychecks in football pools, horse races, and the spectacular ups and downs of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange, Social and religious movements such as the birth of the United Church and the Ku Klux Klan.

James Gray has written of an exciting and flamboyant era, a time never to be forgotten.