"Limerick is one of the most engaging historians writing today." --Richard White The "settling" of the American West has been perceived throughout the world as a series of quaint, violent, and romantic adventures. But in fact, Patricia Nelson Limerick argues, the West has a history grounded primarily in economic reality; in hardheaded questions of profit, loss, competition, and consolidation. Here she interprets the stories and the characters in a new way: the trappers, traders, Indians, farmers, oilmen, cowboys, and sheriffs of the Old West "meant business" in more ways than one, and their descendents mean business today.

This thoroughly researched book is a mammoth tour of the United States, concentrating on the colorful and the dramatic.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of Ghost Soldiers comes an eye-opening history of the American conquest of the West—"a story full of authority and color, truth and prophecy" (The New York Times Book Review). In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness. At the center of this sweeping tale is Kit Carson, the trapper, scout, and soldier whose adventures made him a legend. Sides shows us how this illiterate mountain man understood and respected the Western tribes better than any other American, yet willingly followed orders that would ultimately devastate the Navajo nation. Rich in detail and spanning more than three decades, this is an essential addition to our understanding of how the West was really won.

"Pepper Paige is sick and tired of her life. Sick of fighting and emptiness that surround her as a dance-hall girl - and tired of fearing Jordan Beckett, a violent patron who has turned his attentions on her. Pepper gets her chance to escape when a woman injured in a stagecoach wreck dies in her room. Before she dies, the stranger - a refined, educated Christian - informs Pepper that she was on her way west to marry a rancher she knew only through his letters. Pepper decides to assume Suzanne's identity and get a fresh start on life. But unknown to Pepper, her fiancé is not really Zach, the Christian man who'd been corresponding with Suzanne. Zach has been killed by Indians, and a prison escapee named Tap Andrews has decided to pass himself off as the rancher. What happens when the pair meet? Will they end their charade and embrace the truth about each other's past, as well as the truth of God's love for them? Who will be left standing when Jordan tracks down Tap and finds out that he is about to marry Pepper?"--Back cover.

A richly researched, evocative account of the individuals and institutions involved in the settling of the non-Indian West—and of the impact of the development of the West on the nation as a whole. Making of the American West surveys the experiences of major social groups in the lands from the Mississippi to the Pacific, from the United States' penetration of the region in the early 19th century to its incorporation into national political, economic, and cultural fabric by the early 20th century. This revealing volume offers fascinating portraits of the people and institutions that drove the Western conquest (traders and trappers, ranchers and settlers, corporations, the federal government), as well as of those who resisted conquest or hoped for the emergence of a different society (Indian peoples, Latinos, Asians, wage laborers). Throughout, expert contributors continually return to the growing myth of the West and the impact of its promise of freedom and opportunity on those who sought to "Americanize" it.

ns explore our environmental history, uncover the role of nature and the land in the western past, and examine the West as the world's first multicultural society.

"Epic in its scale, fearless in its scope" (Hampton Sides), this masterfully told account of the American West from a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist sets a new standard as it sweeps from the California Gold Rush and beyond. In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West. He takes us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. He shows how the migrants' dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame-and how those same dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another. The West was where riches would reward the miner's persistence, the cattleman's courage, the railroad man's enterprise; but El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East. Balanced, authoritative, and masterfully told, Dreams of El Dorado sets a new standard for histories of the American West.

In the nineteenth century, the colonial territories of California and Hawai'i underwent important cultural, economic, and ecological transformations influenced by an unlikely factor: cows. The creation of native cattle cultures, represented by the Indian vaquero and the Hawaiian paniolo, demonstrates that California Indians and native Hawaiians adapted in ways that allowed them to harvest the opportunities for wealth that these unfamiliar biological resources presented. But the imposition of new property laws limited these indigenous responses, and Pacific cattle frontiers ultimately became the driving force behind Euro-American political and commercial domination, under which native residents lost land and sovereignty and faced demographic collapse. Environmental historians have too often overlooked California and Hawai'i, despite the roles the regions played in the colonial ranching frontiers of the Pacific World. In Cattle Colonialism, John Ryan Fischer significantly enlarges the scope of the American West by examining the trans-Pacific transformations these animals wrought on local landscapes and native economies.

The American West is mistakenly known as a region with few African Americans and virtually no black history. This work challenges that view in a chronicle that begins in 1528 and carries through to the present-day black success in politics and the surging interest in multiculturalism.