Prologue -- Everything must go -- Welcome to Royal -- Meet Dick Haskin -- The primatologist -- A savage celebration -- Here's Johnny -- A Royal welcome -- The poor farm -- Effective immediately -- Rest -- A wildlife learning encounter -- High and mighty -- Limitations -- Thank you from the town board -- The aftermath -- A laundry list of random complaints -- All rise -- Reincarnation

Royal, Nebraska, population eighty-one--where the church, high school, and post office each stand abandoned, monuments to a Great Plains town that never flourished. But for nearly twenty years, they had a zoo, seven acres that rose from local peculiarity to key tourist attraction to devastating tragedy. And it all began with one man's outsize vision. When Dick Haskin's plans to assist primatologist Dian Fossey in Rwanda were cut short by her murder, Dick's devotion to primates didn't die with her. He returned to his hometown with Reuben, an adolescent chimp, in the bed of a pickup truck and transformed a trailer home into the Midwest Primate Center. As the tourist trade multiplied, so did the inhabitants of what would become Zoo Nebraska, the unlikeliest boon to Royal's economy in generations and, eventually, the source of a power struggle that would lead to the tragic implosion of Dick Haskin's dream