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.