The book is set in the fictional town of Centennial, Colorado, on the non-fictional South Platte River, northeast of Denver. It starts in geological times and progresses through the lives of dinosaurs, the Arapaho Indians, the mountain men and fur trappers, the Oregon Trail pioneers, the Indian wars, the farmers, the cowboys, the dustbowl era and so on up to the present day with its economic and environmental concerns.
Michener has an unfortunate habit of writing with enormous enthusiasm about characters in one chapter and then almost totally ignoring them in later chapters, but the book is still highly recommended. Many readers will wish to skip the first two or three relatively uninteresting chapters on geology and dinosaurs, and commence reading with the first chapter about the Indians before the arrival of the Europeans.
Centennial was made into a television mini-series.
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