Homer on the Range

Act 1. “Go West, young man.” The nineteenth-century newspaper man Horace Greeley is said to have declaimed it first, and he meant it as inspiration. The frontier, the clean slate, the honest wage for honest hands. According to legend, the full quote continues: “There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles.” One notes, with the stirring of tragic irony, that the final jibe is the part they left off the bumper sticker.

What Greeley did not anticipate — and what history has a way of arranging without asking permission — is that the same road leading a man toward fortune can also lead him toward the particular kind of fury that comes from finding out that Fortune had laid her last bet, scooped up her winnings, and skipped town long before he arrived.

Picture the scene: Sometime in the mid to late aughts. A twenty-two-year-old from Somewhere Bay, on the east coast of Canada — let us call him Chad, because statistically...