George McJunkin stood at the summit of the Capulin Volcano in northern New Mexico and looked over the valley below. He had long since left his boyhood in slavery; he had made his own way. He was a Cowboy.

To his west were the Sangre de Christo Mountains and spreading out in the valley below the volcano was the land that had become his home: The Dry Cimarron. He called it his “Promised Land.”

What he would discover in the earth beneath him would create a legacy for the cowboy and rewrite the history of the continent.