The Fence and the Fire

A literary Western novel about what happens after survival succeeds—when a frontier settlement becomes orderly, profitable, and unrecognizable to the people who built it.

Set in the late nineteenth-century American West, the story follows a town reorganized by law, finance, and administrative systems. As order replaces discretion and success replaces survival, the man who once held the center of the town is rendered unnecessary—not through violence, but through competence.