While many studies of religion in the West have focused on the region's diversity, freedom, and individualism, Todd M. Kerstetter brings together the three most glaring exceptions to those rules to explore the boundaries of tolerance as enforced by society and the U.S. government. In sharp contrast to the mythic image of the West as the "Land of the Free," Kerstetter analyzes three tragic episodes that reveal the West as a cultural battleground: the Mormon Utah Expedition and Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, the Lakota Ghost Dancers and the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota in 1890, and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas in 1993.