Some members chafe at the perception that Yellowstone was a billionaires-only club. While many arrive via private jet, others fly commercial and everyone ends up at the same airport in Bozeman, about an hour north of the club. This helps explain why the Credit Suisse loan  the spending spree it enabled, the myriad legal actions it prompted, the bitter divorce it helped fuel  has been such a resounding bummer for members.

“The promise of the Yellowstone Club was somehow sacrificed to the madness of Yellowstone Club World. The plan that worked was held hostage to the ever more grandiose plan that didn’t,” Mr. Hill says. “There is more than enough material to create a roman à clef that would make ‘Dallas’ or ‘Dynasty’ seem mild in comparison.”

LIKE every good drama, this one has an intriguing setup. The son of Norwegian immigrants, Mr. Blixseth grew up poor in Oregon and, he said in a magazine interview, executed his first deal when he was about 13  buying three donkeys for $75 and reselling them as pack mules for $225. He briefly attended college, according to earlier profiles, but dropped out. Later came his timber deals.

Mr. Blixseth met Edra Crocker in Oregon, where she was living, unhappily, with her first husband and their two children. Later, she would write a book, called “Uncharged Battery,” which described the alleged abuse she suffered in that marriage, which ended in the early ’80s.

Back then she was the breadwinner, she says, turning a graveyard waitressing shift into a managerial job for a restaurant chain and then into her own venture: a partnership in a small hotel and restaurant company. She sold her stake after getting involved with Mr. Blixseth, and they married in 1983.Three years later, after one of Mr. Blixseth’s timber transactions failed, the couple filed for bankruptcy, claiming $15.4 million in debt and $4,400 in assets, according to court records.

Then yet another timber deal set the stage for what would become the Yellowstone Club. Mr. Blixseth swapped 100,000 acres that he and two partners had bought in Montana with the federal government for the land that now encompasses the club. His partners took the timberland, and Mr. Blixseth took the acreage that could be developed.

At first, the Blixseths thought they would build a family compound. But they began hearing from wealthy friends who wanted in. “Sometimes you have to pay to play,” the Yellowstone Club’s Web site said in its early years. That message would be massaged over time to stress family values, not net worth. Yes, to qualify for membership, you had to have money: a minimum of $3 million in liquid assets. But the Blixseths eventually realized that they were selling something more valuable than exclusivity, something that eluded the moneyed classes: a sort of hometown normalcy. Soon, the club had a new catchphrase: “Where Families Gather.”