Pioneer US Forest Service rangers and their ranger stations are classic symbols of the American West. Rangers managed the public forests and ranges with the cattlemen, sheepmen, lumbermen, miners, homesteaders, and others who used--and, in many cases, still use-- the lands to build and sustain economies and ways of life. The early rangers are no longer around. But some of the stations from which they protected the West's national forests to secure "the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run," as decreed by the first chief of the US Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, remain to tell their stories and inspire their successors.

Follows four generations of Haurowitzes, from 1859 when the first Jewish settler, Boggy, arrives in Oklahoma's forgotten territory. Intertwined with a family of Swedish immigrants, they struggle against betrayals, nature, and burgeoning statehood, to find their families utterly transformed.

"Most of us have felt the fascination of seeing a steam locomotive with smoke drifting back over the line of cars it pulled, as the whole train wound through tall Western mountains. Whether we have actually experienced it or not, and many have, we know such a thing existed and that it is now part of a past that we can't touch again. But in Stations West, Edwin Culp comes close. With four hundred eighty photographs, carefully collected over a period of more than twenty years, he presents an exciting graphic history of Oregon railways from their beginnings to the present. Following the tracks as they were laid, from the Willamette Valley to the Oregon desert, he illustrates, in all its many facets, a heritage which has passed"--