Grey submitted the manuscript of Tonto Basin to the magazine The Country Gentleman, which published it in serialization as To the Last Man from May 28, 1921 through July 30, 1921.

The story begins with 24-year-old Jean Isbel in the last stages of a multi-week trip from Oregon to the frontier in Arizona where his family had moved four years earlier to start a cattle ranch.

They meet again and his words awake in her doubt and fear that her father, Lee Jorth, is not an honorable man but in fact a horse thief and cattle rustler.

Ellen now on foot meets one of the dying Isbels and finally learns the certain truth that her father, family, and their allies were horse thieves and cattle rustlers as she feared.

Grey writes about the intense concern Jean feels for the impact the violence will have on the wives and children whose husbands and fathers will die in the feud.

The story explores how love, betrayal, and jealousy can engender a hate which leads two men to destroy their families, without a thought to the pain and suffering of those relatives who will be left to bury the dead.

She grows and matures emotionally and psychologically, becoming aware that her father whom she had supported with unquestioning trust, is in fact a scoundrel, a thief, and a thoroughly dishonorable rogue.

During this research he discovered that Last of the Duanes and Rangers of the Lone Star were much altered from the holograph found "in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet in the Zane Grey, Inc. room where it had survived for eighty years.".