General introduction -- I. The West without a West: the Indians: Introduction to Part I --
Beginnings: A Navajo creation song -- In a hard land / Margaret M. Wheat -- In a land of plenty / Frank Boas --
Timeless laughter: Coyote and Doctor Duck -- Indian wit / Edwin James -- Indian love-call / Andrew Garcia --
A visionary world: A warrior's vision / Two Leggings -- A Pawnee war song : testing the vision -- Indian justice / Claude Levi-Strauss --
New, strange, white people: A Tewa prophecy: the coming of the Whites - Medicine-man's reply to an English temperance society / George Catlin --
Claiming the land: An Indian's view / Chief Luther Standing Bear -- As a future president saw it / Theodore Roosevelt --
Inventing the Indian: Indians as Greeks / Alfred Jacob Miller -- The Indian as sentimentalized victim / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -- Indians as degenerates / Horace Greeley -- The metaphysics of Indian-hating / Herman Melville --
Hostilities: Cleaning up the Shoshones / Washington Irving -- After the Battle of the Little Bighorn / Wooden Leg -- Smallpox destroys the Mandans / George Catlin --
Survivors: Broken promises / Chief Joseph -- A messianic movement: Four Ghost-Dance songs -- The last wild Indian in North America -- Why should the Gosiutes fight the Germans? / Joseph H. Peck -- Hands / Robinson Jeffers --
II. The West as mythical topography: Introduction to Part II --
First across the West, 1528-1536: Naked among Indians / Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca -- Hints of riches / Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca -- Rescued by Christians / Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca --
The West as El Dorado: The seven cities of Cibola / Marcos de Niza -- Coronado enters Cibola / Pedro de Castaneda -- Rumors of Quivira / Pedro de Castaneda -- Report to the King / Francisco Vasquez Coronado --
O strange new world: Frightening beasts, remarkable events / Pedro de Castaneda -- Imaginary island of the West / Garci Rodriguez Ordonez de Montalvo -- California is not an island / Eusebio Francisco Kino -- These new heathendoms / Eusebio Francisco Kino --
Looking far west: Route to the western sea / Louis-Joseph de la Verendrye -- The Great Unknown / Philip Freneau -- Land of promise / Timothy Dwight -- Paradise glimpsed / John Bolt -- It might be a dream / Meriwether Lewis -- The romantic West / Edgar Allan Poe -- The Great American Desert / Zebulon Montgomery Pike -- The gardens of the desert / William Cullen Bryant -- The end of the far West / Zenas Leonard --
Fremont maps the West: John C. Fremont and Charles Preuss --
Western dreams: Land of the free / Josiah Gregg -- Land of regeneration / William Perkins -- The West as waste / George McDuffie -- Manifest destiny / William Gilpin -- The West as Eden -- Passage to India / Thomas Hart Benton --
Westward movement: metaphor and fact: A country of the mind / Henry David Thoreau -- A country for the mindless / Henry David Thoreau --
A country of extremes: New senses, new joy / Walt Whitman -- Waterfalls / Meriwether Lewis -- Colter's Hell / Pierre-Jean de Smet -- The prairie / James Fenimore Cooper -- Illusions / Josiah Gregg -- Mono Lake / Mark Twain -- Tempests / Stephen Crane -- Hail / Mari Sandoz -- Grasshoppers / Everett Dick -- Mojave Desert / John C. Van Tramp -- Yosemite / Clarence King -- Winds / John Muir -- The Grand Canyon / John Wesley Powell -- The big sky / Robert Louis Stevenson -- Loneliness / John Noble --
The closing of the West: The significance of the frontier in American history / Frederick Jackson Turner -- Facing west from California's shores / Walt Whitman --
III. The West as frontier: the mountain men: Introduction to Part III -- St. Louis want ads, 1822-1823: Missouri Gazette: To enterprising young men; St. Louis Enquirer: For the Rocky Mountains --
White Indians: The mountaineers / Washington Irving -- Falstaff's Battalion / James Clyman -- Wild and wandering life / Samuel Parker -- Rubbed out / Smith, Jackson, & Sublette -- A trapper's gear and method / George F. Ruxton -- A trapper's routine / James Ohio Pattie --
Portrait of a mountain man: The journal of Jedediah Smith / Jedediah Strong Smith -- A lesson to remember / James Clyman -- A eulogy for the great American pathfinder / Illinois Monthly Magazine, June, 1832 --
Rendezvous: Mountain business / Washington Irving -- Days of jubilee / William Drummond Stewart -- Devil's Den / Myra F. Eells --
Rocky Mountain college: Winter camp / Osborne Russell -- Mountain politics / Osborne Russell -- Jim Bridger and Shakespeare / J. Lee Humfreville --
Tall tales: Indian fighting / J. Lee Humfreville -- The petrified forest / George F. Ruxton -- A trip to hell, or, What the mountain man saw during delirium tremens / Lewis F. Garrard --
Shaping the legend: Kit Carson: Scalping Indians / Kit Carson -- Promoting the myth / John C. Fremont -- Deflating the hero / Charles Preuss -- The mythic hero / Charles Burdett -- The man meets the myth / Kit Carson --
Leaving the mountains: Ashley's farewell address / Jim Beckwourth -- A trapper's reflections / Osborne Russell --
IV. The West as Promised Land: Introduction to Part IV -- Propaganda for a promised land: The emigrants' guide / Lansford W. Hastings -- How to make the trek / J.M. Shively --
First white women over the Rockies: The diary of Eliza Hart Spalding / Eliza Hart Spalding -- The diary of Narcissa Prentiss Whitman / Narcissa Prentiss Whitman --
Who they were: A pioneer's view / Jesse Applegate -- A Boston intellectual's view / Francis Parkman -- A pioneer woman / John Minto --
On the trail: Alkali country / Bernard DeVoto -- A handcart company / Edmund Ellsworth -- Crossing the Plains / John A. Stone --
Disasters: The Donner-Reed tragedy / Virginia Reed -- A handcart disaster / John Chislett -- Song of the Handcart Expedition -- By their own kind : the Mountain Meadows Massacre / John D. Lee --
End of the trail: Out of the desert / Sarah Royce -- Over the Sierra Nevada / J. Goldsborough Bruff -- Making do in the wilderness / Jesse A. Applegate --
A Mormon Zion: Brigham Young's vision / Wilford Woodruff -- A pioneer woman's view / Harriet Young -- Building the kingdom / Thomas Bullock -- A British adventurer on Mormon marriage / Richard Burton -- On polygamy and Brigham Young / Mark Twain -- Paradise as a police state / Arthur Conan Doyle -- A new alphabet for a peculiar people --
Looking back: The frontier and the American identity / Erik H. Erickson -- The men of Forty-nine / Joaquin Miller --
V. The wild West: Introduction to Part V --
Code of the West: Cowboy wisdom / Ramon F. Adams -- When you call me that, "Smile!" / Owen Wister -- A Basque learns the Code / Robert Laxalt --
Rush for gold: The Californian -- Gold Rush letters / J.D.B. Stillman -- Journal of life at Sonora, 1849-1852 / William Perkins -- A view from the East / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- The Luck of Roaring Camp / Bret Harte -- Silver mining in Nevada / Mark Twain --
Working cowboys: The prototype: vaquero / William H. Emory -- How to become a cowboy / Charles A. Siringo -- A message to Congress about "cowboys" / Chester A. Arthur -- In defense of the cowboy / Theodore Roosevelt -- On the trail / Andy Adams -- From black slave to Texas cowboy / James Cape -- The Old Chisholm Trail [song lyrics] --
Inventing the cowboy: The genesis of a hero / Frederic Remington -- The evolution of a cow-puncher / Owen Wister -- The finished product: The Virginian / Owen Wister --
Frontier justice: A day in court / Dodge City Times -- Swift and terrible retribution / Thomas J. Dimsdale -- Their majesties, the Mob / Louisa Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe -- The vigilantes / Margaret Ashmun --
Western culture: Impressions of a world traveler / Anthony Trollope -- Art criticism of the West / Oscar Wilde --
Gunslingers: Ben Thompson dies with his boots on / Richard Harding Davis -- A gunslinger's own story / John Wesley Hardin -- Billy the Kid -- Facts about Billy the Kid / Ramon F. Adams -- Billy the Kid -- The disinterested killer, Bill Harrigan / Jorge Luis Borges -- The myth lives on [song lyrics] / Bob Dylan --
The mild West: The trooper / Richard Harding Davis -- Galveston, Texas, in 1895 / Stephen Crane -- The West from a car-window / Richard Harding Davis --
The fading West: Leaving Cheyenne [song lyrics] -- Settling down / Zane Grey -- Carrion spring / Wallace Stegner --
Promoting the myth: Buffalo Bill: Buffalo Bill's own story / William F. Cody -- Buffalo Bill's Wild West [ script ] -- The Wild West in England / William F. Cody -- Buffalo Bill's defunct / E.E. Cummings --
VI. A second frontier: Farmers, miners, militants: Introduction to Part VI --
The dream of the Garden: The dream of the Garden / Josiah Gregg -- Letter from a woman homesteader / Elinore Pruitt Stewart -- Facing the great unknown / O.E. Rolvaag -- A first crop / Ole Edvart Rolvaag -- A black Moses in Kansas / Pap Singleton -- Marching to Kansas: song of the Exodusters -- Democracy on the sodhouse frontier / Hamlin Garland -- A defense of cattlemen / Walter Prescott Webb -- Fence war begins in Wyoming / Asa Shinn Mercer -- Bonanza farming triumphant / C.C. Coffin --
The opening of the industrial West: The railroad: a practical plan / Theodore D. Judah -- Personal life of a Chinese coolie / Wallace A. Clay -- Working on the Great Northern / Stoyan Christowe -- The railroad squeezes the farmer / Frank Norris -- A mine in the Comstock Lode / Dan De Quille -- Boomtown philosophy in Oklahoma / Woody Guthrie -- Bust in El Dorado, Kansas / Willa Cather --
Workers on the second frontier: A lumberjack's life / J.G. Brown -- Cowboy proletarians / Edward and Eleanor Marx Aveling -- Big Bill Haywood goes to the Coeur d'Alene / Bill Haywood -- Big Bill organizes the bronc busters / Bill Haywood -- Labor war in Colorado / John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; L.M. Bowers -- The Ludlow Massacre / John Reed -- Hard times in a land of plenty / Henry George -- Hoboes that pass in the night / Jack London -- Around a western water tank [song lyrics] -- Wobbly mythology / John Dos Passos -- Remembering Joe Hill [song lyrics] / Alfred Hayes, Earl Robinson --
Bleak vistas, reclaimed dreams: Beyond the 98th Meridian / A.M. Simons -- Drought in Nebraska / Mari Sandoz -- A plan that failed / Mary Hallock Foote -- A town of the plain / Hamlin Garland -- Fresno / William Saroyan -- The last trek / John Steinbeck -- The war of the flowers / Stan Steiner --
VII. Beyond the West: Introduction to Part VII --
Looking for the West: Wild West week in Cheyenne / Jack Kerouac -- Moving to New Mexico / Paul Johnson -- The San Francisco Indians / Simon J. Ortiz -- A lot of cowboys / Judith Roscoe -- Cowboy politics / Henry Kissinger -- A West to be saved / Bill Moyers --
The West on film: The search for authenticity: a mechanical horse / William S. Hart -- Dreaming of cowboys / Sherwood Anderson -- Dreaming and waking: cowboys / Helen Zeese Papanikolas -- Cowboys, movie, myth, and Cadillacs / Larry McMurtry -- The Westerner / Robert Warshow -- The Marlboro Man / Frank Bergon --
The look of the West: Herreid, South Dakota / Robert M. Pirsig
The Clark's Fork Valley, Wyoming / Ernest Hemingway
A painter's West / Georgia O'Keeffe
A photographer's West / Edward Weston
Camas Prairie School / Richard Hugo
The west from a car window / Thomas Wolfe
Northwest lodgepole pine / Gary Snyder
Boulder Dam / J.B. Priestly
The great Central Valley of California / Joan Didion
San Narciso, California / Thomas Pynchon
The West from the air / W.H. Auden
November surf / Robinson Jeffers.
