The American West: a new interpretive history

Introduction: dreams and homelands

A new world begins

Contest of cultures

The struggle of empires

The land and its markers

Finding purchase

War and destiny

Machine

A search for community

The urban frontier

New frontiers

As the west goes ...

"It ain't where you're from, it's where you're at."

Preface

Introduction: dreams and homelands

A new world begins

Contest of cultures

The struggle of empires

The land and its markers

The fur trade

From Texas to Oregon

War and destiny

Mining frontiers

The power of the road

Open range

The safety valve

A search for community

The urban frontier

Plunder and preservation

Myth of the West

The frontier and West in our time

Notes.

Illustrations: The Spaniards arrive in the Southwest: Navajo pictogram, Canyon del Muerto, Arizona, c. eighteenth century / Helga Teiwes -- Canadian Indian / Louis Nicolas, from Codex Canadienis -- Delaware chief, Tishcohan / Gustavus Hesselius, 1732 -- Mohawk leader, Joseph Brant / Gilbert Stuart, 1786 -- George Rogers Clark / John Wesley Jarvis, c. 1820 -- Little Turtle, Miami chief and war leader of Ohio confederacy / copy of a lost portrait by Gilbert Stuart, c. 1796 -- Red Jacket / Charles Bird King -- Plains Indian pictogram on a buffalo robe / copy by Samuel Seymour, c. 1819 -- Fur trade rendezvous near Green River / Alfred Jacob Miller -- Indians and trader examine furs, late nineteenth century -- Pawnees in council with the Stephen Long expedition / Samuel Seymour, 1819 -- Juan Seguin / Jefferson Wright, 1838 -- Major Ridge, Cherokee chief -- Black Hawk and his lieutenants in chains / George Catlin -- Wagon train passing through Castle Creek Valley / W. H. Killingworth -- Jesse Benton Fremont / Carleton Watkins, c. 1850 -- Brigham Young / Frederick H. Piercy, 1855 -- John A. Sutter / Pach, 1877 -- General John E. Wool and his staff entering Saltillo, Mexico, 1847 -- Juan Cortina, c. 1870 -- White Horse, Pawnee scout / William Henry Jackson, c. 1869 -- Antislavery militia in Kansas, c. 1856 -- George Bent and his Cheyenne wife, Magpie, niece of Black Kettle, c. 1867 -- Chinese and American miners work the head of Auburn Ravine, 1852 -- Two Chinese toughs, Blackfoot, Idaho, c. 1870 -- Sioux Indians at Fort Laramie for the treaty conference, 1868 -- Sitting Bull / Bailey, Dix, and Meade, 1882 --A Sioux version of the Battle of the Little Bighorn / Sioux Indian Painting, 1938 -- An American version of the Battle of the Little Bighorn / Frederick Whittaker -- Female prospectors on their way to the Yukon / B.W. Kilburn, 1899 -- Prostitutes in Dawson City, Yukon Territory / B.W. Kilburn, 1899 -- Homestake Mine, Lead City, Dakota Territory / J.C.H. Grabill, 1888 -- Red River carts and Indians / Stanley Morrow, c. 1870 -- Stagecoach at Elko, Nevada / A.J. Russell, c. 1869 -- Temporary and permanent bridges at Green River, Wyoming / A.J. Russell, c. 1869 -- Apache chief, Geronimo / E.K. Sturtevant, c. 1886 -- Jesse and Frank James, c. 1875 -- Wichita, Kansas, 1870 and 1875 -- A mountain of buffalo bones, c. 1880 -- The Johnson County invaders -- Horace Greeley, 1872 -- Nebraska homesteaders post in front of their soddy [ cow on roof, two mules, dog ] / Solomon D. Butcher, c. 1880 -- Women homesteaders pose outside their tar-paper shack in South Dakota, c. 1910 -- Populist orator, Mary Lease, c. 1890 --

Illustrations: Industrial Workers of the World cartoon, c. 1910

Mormon family in Utah / A.J. Russell, c. 1869

The Spees family [ black ], homesteaders near Westerville, Colorado, c. 1880

A group of Chiracahua Apache students on their arrival at Carlisle Indian School, and four months later, c. 1890

Arapaho Ghost Dancers / James Mooney, 1893

Burial of the dead at Wounded Knee / George Trager, 1890

Texas Rangers pose with the corpses of Mexican raiders near the Rio Grande / Robert Runyon, 1915

Mexican cotton pickers on strike in California's San Joaquin Valley, 1933

A crowd celebrates the arrival of Owens River water in Los Angeles County, 1913

Japanese Americas assemble for internment, Bainbridge Island, Washington / Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 3, 1942

Yosemite Valley / Albert Bierstadt, c. 1875

A tourist and a resident of Yellowstone National Park, c. 1935

Lumberjacks fell a giant spruce in Washington / C. Kinsey, c. 1900

President Theodore Roosevelt stands with Gifford Pinchot and John Muir at Sequoia Grove in California's Sierra Nevadas, 1903

Naturalist Herma Albertson Baggley poses in ranger uniform with coworkers at Yellowstone National Park, 1933

John Collier meets with a group of Oglalas at the Pine Ridge Reservation, 1933

Apache cowboys on a roundup in Gila County, Arizona / Gilbert Campbell, 1941

Navajo shepherds with their flock / Edward S. Curtis, c. 1905

Portraits of three western Indians : Kaskaia; Shienne chief [ Cheyenne ]; Arappaho [Arapaho] / Samuel Seymour, c. 1820

Snake girl swinging / Alfred Jacob Miller, c. 1837

The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak / Albert Bierstadt, 1863

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone / Thomas Moran, 1872

Yellowstone geyser / Thomas Moran, 1871

Smelting works at Denver / Thomas Moran, 1892

The intersection of San Vicente and Fairfax Avenues, Los Angeles, 1922 and 1966

Tribal chairman George Gillette weeps as Secretary of Interior J. A. Krug purchases 155,000 acres of the Mandan-Arikara-Hidatsa reservation in North Dakota for use as a Missouri River reservoir / William Chaplis, 1948

Russell Means and other occupiers of Wounded Knee / Richard Erdoes, 1973

Cesar Chavez at a farmworkers' strike in Tulare County, California, 1965

United Farm Workers election poster, c. 1965

Forest Service officials conduct journalists on a tour of clear-cut and terraced hillsides in the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana / Dale Burk, 1979.

Maps: Native culture areas

Tribal locations

The Spanish invasions

Three North American empires in the eighteenth century

The Spanish North in the eighteenth century

Western land claims of the states

The survey system

The Northwest Territory

The Louisiana Purchase and the fur trade

Texas

Indian Removal

The overland trails

The U. S.-Mexican War

Territorial acquisitions and statehood

Western mining

Western railroads

Texas cattle trails

Indian land cessions

The foreign-born population in 1900

Federal lands in the West

Western cities, 1990

Indian reservations

Emerging minorities.