The West: An Illustrated History

In a vivid narrative that begins with the arrival of the first Europeans and ends well into the twentieth century, author Geoffrey C. Ward provides a gripping journey through the turbulent history of the region that has come to symbolize America around the world. Drawing upon hundreds of letters, diaries, memoirs, and journals as well as the latest scholarship. The West chronicles the arrival of wave after wave of newcomers from every direction of the compass, each of which invested the harsh but majestic western landscape with its own myths and desires and dreams. The cast is as rich and diverse as the western landscape itself - explorers and soldiers and Indian warriors, settlers and railroad builders and gaudy showmen. Coronado and Custer, Jesse James and Chief Joseph and Brigham Young and Buffalo Bill are all here. But so are scores of lesser-known westerners whose stories are no less compelling - a Chinese ditchdiggger and a rich Mexican landowner, a forty-niner from Chile and a T