In the span of a single human lifetime, the United States swept from the Mississippi to the Pacific — across grass oceans, silver mountains, and deserts that had belonged to other nations for ten thousand years. It was the age of the wagon train and the golden spike, the long cattle drive and the boomtown saloon, the six-gun and the sod house. And even as it happened, it was being turned into a story.
The Wild West was never one place. It was the Great Plains of the Sioux and the Comanche, the gold country of the Forty-Niners, the borderland ranches of the vaqueros, the railroad camps of Chinese laborers, and the homesteads of women who "proved up" 160 acres of wind. E.B Cohen braids them all together — from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee, from Sutter's Mill to the O.K. Corral, from Sitting Bull to Buffalo Bill.
This is the full story of how the West was won, and lost, and sold back to us as myth: the geniuses and killers, the treaties broken and the buffalo destroyed, the fortunes made and the peoples dispossessed — and how a raw, violent, complicated conquest became the most powerful legend America ever told about itself.
