Elliott West lays out the main events and developments of the emergence of the American West, situating the birth of the West in the broader narrative of American history between 1848 and 1880.

Elliott West is Alumni Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of numerous books, including The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story and The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado.
 
 

List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Series Editor’s Introduction, by Richard Etulain
Prelude: 773,510,680 Acres
Acknowledgments
Part 1. Unsettling America
1. The Great Coincidence
2. Division and Multiplication
3. Letting Blood
4. The Horse and the Hammer
5. Conquest in Stutter-Step
6. Carnal Property
7. The Fluid West
8. Continental Reckoning
9. Civil War and the “Indian Problem”
Part 2. Things Come Together
10. Iron Bands and Tongues of Fire
11. Connections Real and Imagined
12. Maps
13. The “Science of Man” and the American Sublime
14. The World’s Convention
15. Crew Cultures, Cribs and Schoolhouses, Women on the Fringe
Part 3. Worked into Being
16. Cattle and the New America
17. Wind, Fever, and Indians Unhorsed
18. Breaking the Land
19. Domination and Extinction
20. When the West Turned Inside Out
21. Legal Wrestling, the Land Convulsed
22. The Final Undoing
23. Creating the West
Notes
Bibliography
Index