"Thirty-three people live in Mountain City, Nevada, at the outset of Gregory Martin's portrait: by the end of the book, there are thirty-one and none of them are children. The town's heyday is long past, its abandoned mines testimony to the cycle of promise, exploitation, abandonment, and attrition that has been the repeated story of the West.

Yet the comings and goings at Tremewan's, the general store Martin's family has run for more than forty years, make the town seem like a more vibrant place than many small cities. The store is a hub for a stoic but close-knit community that includes salty widows, Native Americans from a nearby reservation and a number of Martin's deeply idiosyncratic relatives, descendants of the Basque sheepherders who settled in this remote northeastern corner of the state during the nineteenth century.

Martin observes them as they go about their lives, persisting in a difficult but rewarding existence."--BOOK JACKET.