The Bone Wars is set in the northern Great Plains of the United States in the 1870s, when most of the region was untamed territory still freely roamed by Cheyenne and Sioux Indian tribes.

The states of North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana, where most of the action takes place, were not yet formed. The region is on the threshold of great change, as the familiar elements of the Old West—miners, railroaders, boatmen, farmers, townsmen, gamblers, cattlemen, and the U.S. Cavalry—were poised to enter the land in great numbers and claim it as their own. Into this stew pot of American expansion come the practitioners of the new sciences: geologists, botanists, and the "bone men"—paleontologists, who seek the fossils of ancient life forms to describe a long-ago real world stranger than most fiction.

The main characters in the novel come...