Winning the Wild West: The Epic Saga of the American Frontier, 1800--1899

One of the greatest stories of nineteenth-century America is its expansion into the lands west of the Mississippi. Now acclaimed author Page Stegner shows in one sweeping volume how the opening of the western frontier ignited and defined a young nation's spirit of enterprise and discovery. Winning the Wild West is an illustrated celebration of that epoch, rich in the deeds and exploits of legendary and forgotten characters, replete with hundreds of never-before-published artifacts and archival images reproduced in full color. Stories of life on the frontier fire our imaginations, but Page Stegner looks upon this epic story with an unflinching gaze, recognizing, as Larry McMurtry notes in his foreword, how severe and equivocal the struggle to "win" the West was. Our great land was once filled with millions of buffalo that were needlessly slaughtered, the rivers of our heartland were also mismanaged, and California, the most western state, saw the complete eradication of native tribes now lost forever. The era's pioneers were often doing little more than clinging to life*with what little strength they had left. From Lewis and Clark to the massacre at Wounded Knee, Page Stegner re-creates an engrossing, gorgeous panorama of trappers, wagon trains, cattle drives, guns, gold rushes, outlaws, lawmen, settlers, buffalo hunters, railroads, cowboy hats, and barbed wire-the hard lives of the people and the items they carried that made a new culture, a new society...a new nation.