Your Life as Every Rank in a Wild West Outlaw Gang

You are 18, born in 1856 in Clay County, Missouri, a farm boy in the years after the Civil War. Nobody asks you to join the gang. A man named Silas Broom hands you a feed sack and four sets of reins, and that is how it starts. This is one life from 18 to 52, lived through ten ranks of a Wild West outlaw gang: horse holder, lookout, rustler, rider, inside man, powder man, segundo and boss. Each rank has a new place, a new physical job and a new price, paid for in dollars, in family silence and in other men's mistakes. Along the way the story passes real events, from the failed raid on the bank at Northfield, Minnesota, in 1876 to the Lincoln County War in New Mexico, and shows how the big names look from the bottom of the ladder. The film asks what the top of the gang is worth when you reach it. The answer waits on a dark road, with a boy holding the reins you once held.