Jackson Miggs was a loner who wintered under the Ute Peak in his log cabin. He liked people well enough, but didn't care much for crowds. He even tolerated the cowmen like Hyatt Tolman who used the high meadows around Ute Peak to graze his herd—even when the animals cropped the forage too closely and drove the elk and deer into the higher mountains. Miggs told Frank McCoy that if he saw a building less than two hundred feet away, he felt like things were closing in on him.
In return for Jack's friendship, McCoy would take Miggs' fur pelts to sell at Fort Laramie and Cheyenne, then dig up the money he had buried for Jack to bring to him in the spring. But this time McCoy was accompanied by beautiful Beverly Shafter and a herd of cattle driven by Denver Holt and his crew. They moved right onto the grazing land that the Tolman herd had been coming to for years. There was no doubt about it—there was going to be trouble in Ute Peak country.
