Newspapers of the day described young men with a burning desire to get rich on the frontier as having a bad case of "western fever," and by 1836 Gideon Truesdell had surely caught it. He struggled with life on the frontier until he amassed a million-dollar ($68 million today) fortune in the lumber, agricultural, cattle, and mining businesses. Late in life the Chicago Fire nearly wiped him out, and at the age of sixty-three he started over in Silver...