In the beginning. New Mexico's mystery stone / Dixie L. Perkins -- The message in the bottle / George Winship -- Drake's brass plaque / James D. Hart -- The real Manila galleon -- The long way home / Meriwether Lewis -- The stone Thoen found / Frank Thompson -- Boulders taller than the Great Tower of Seville / Garcia Lopez de Cardenas -- "The most sublime spectacle on earth" / John Wesley Powell -- Fifty leagues of silver / Alonso de Benevides -- Captain José Zúñiga's report -- Are we prisoners of war? / Zebulon Montgomery Pike -- The Russians in California / William A. Slacum -- The original westerners. Ishi, the last one left alive / Theodora Kroeber -- The man who killed the deer / Frank Waters -- The pacifist warrior / Jack Schaefer -- The way to Rainy Mountain / N. Scott Momaday -- Colter's Run / H.M. Chittenden -- "Can you blot out those stars?" / Myron Angel -- "I will fight no more forever" -- The Navajos. The murder of Narbona / Franc Johnson Newcomb -- Barboncito's plea -- The Hogan / Gladys Reichard -- Laughing Boy / Oliver La Farge -- The death of Old Man Hat / Walter Dyk -- The Hispanos. The muleteers / Max Morehead -- Brothers of the light / Marta Weigle -- Blessing the animals / John A. Lomax -- Ramona / Helen Hunt Jackson -- A Santa Fe fandango / George Frederick Ruxton -- Frontier life. The burning bush / A.W. Whipple -- A twenty-dollar Christmas ball / Alexander Kelly McClure -- Christmas in Round Valley / John Wesley Clampitt -- "A rather pretentious sod house" / Everett Dick -- "Quite discouraged and impatient for his death ..." / George Yount -- The bashful trapper / Jacob Fowler -- "And the skies are not cloudy all day" / Alan Bosworth -- The $175,000 sack of flour -- How Americans get ahead / William Shepherd -- J.C. Penney's first day / Norman Beasley -- Wolf Willow / Wallace Stegner -- The melting pot / Robert Laxalt -- Basques in Nevada / Robert Laxalt -- Nails and whiskey / Alexander Toponce -- Death Valley Scotty's story / Eleanor Jordan Houston -- Burial customs at Fort Pierre / Thaddeus Culbertson -- Cowboys. The Harvard cowboy / Richard Trimble -- The spree at the end of the trail -- Charlie Siringo's flirtation / Charlie Siringo -- "I threw my timid friend a bisquit" / Theodore Baughman -- The cowboy strike / David Dary -- The first rodeos / Charles Nordhoff -- The chuck wagon / Eugene Manlove Rhodes -- When you call me that, smile! / Owen Wister -- Tall tales and practical jokes. The travelling stones, and other such affairs / Duncan Emrich -- The first jumping frog -- How trout survive mountain winters -- "I am not aware that anyone has been born lately" / J. Ross Browne -- I paint the truth just as it is / J. Ross Browne -- The buffalo corral and milking pen / James Stevens -- The Greasewood Golf Course / Dick Wick Hall -- The badger fight / Bill Oden -- "Anything that will make money" -- Characters. "Genial if rambunctious" / Marthy "Calamity" Janes Cannary -- How the ski came to snow country / Robert Laxalt -- The emperor of California / Joshua Norton -- Schlatter the healer / Agnes Morley Cleaveland -- Law west of the Pecos / C.L. Sonnichsen -- How Phoenix got its name / Lawrence Clark Powell -- Uncle Dick Wootton / Agnes Morley Cleaveland -- Culture comes to Virginia City / R.D. Miller -- The mines. Gold only waiting to be gathered up / Paul Horgan -- "Something shining in the bottom of the ditch" / James W. Marshall -- "Men living like coyotes" / J. Ross Browne -- Sutro's tunnel -- Growing up in Bonanza Town / John Taylor Walford -- Boyhood at the Chloride Flat / James K. Hastings -- The Sun River stampede / Robert Vaughan -- The post-hole banks / J. Frank Dobie -- There's gems in them thar hills / Randall Henderson -- Women. "A pretty hoorah place" / Nannie Alderson -- Now the prairie life begins! / Susan Shelby Magoffin -- The pregnant private / William Gilpin -- Great Western, the Army's Amazon / Arthur Woodward -- Doing the washing / Eleanor McGovern -- "A ball put in your carcass" / Caroline Nichols Churchill -- Rags to riches to rags / Robert Laxalt -- And from rags to riches to starvation / Marshall Sprague -- Buscuits, coffee and beans / Annie D. Tallent -- Greasy meals, infested with lazy flies / Isabella Bird -- Contempt of court / Ellen Jack -- Goldfield booms / Anne Ellis -- Law and disorder. Missed four thousand times / Elfego Baca -- The Marquis de Peralta -- "It began with a wrong and outrage" / Eugene Manlove Rhodes -- The real Billy the Kid / Howard Bryan -- Billy's alive, and so is Jesse / C.L. Sonnichsen -- That famous shootout at the O.K. Corral -- The soldier of fortune / Thompson M. Turner -- "No complaint was made against him" / Thompson M. Turner -- Taking politics seriously / Ralph Emerson Twitchell -- The Hanging Windmill / Howard Bryan -- More action at Hanging Windmill / Howard Bryan -- The Johnson County War / T.A. Larson -- Travel. Over the Oregon Trail / Bernard DeVoto -- Thus the first mail was brought on camels / Edward F. Beale -- Aubry's great ride / J. Frank Dobie -- "Without anything to eat but the dead" / Virginia Reed -- "Goodbye, Death Valley" -- Fifteen-hundred hats were lost yearly / Raphael Pumpelly -- The great wagon-train swindle / William Miles -- Hrace Greeley's wild ride / Artemus Ward -- What the travel agent doesn't tell you / H.M. Chittenden -- Cold feet -- A revolver is an admirable tool ... / Sir Richard Burton -- The desert traveler's kit / Joseph P. Allyn -- How exquisitely pleasant, how cosy and delightful! / James Rusling -- The race for Raton Pass / James Marshall -- The continent is joined / Theodore H. Hittell -- They do not drink, fight, or strike / Charles Nordhoff -- The Rawhide Railroad / George Estes -- 185 miles in fifteen hours and twenty minutes / Alexander Majors -- Finally, behind the wheel! / Upton Sinclair -- Steinbeck's Highway 66 / John Steinbeck -- The military. The last word from the Alamo / William Travis -- The Mormon Battalion / James Ferguson -- "We have come amongst you" / Stephen Watts Kearny -- Paddy Graydon's Civil War -- Custer's last letter home / George Armstrong Custer -- Mrs. Custer hears the news / Elizabeth Custer -- The Western way with words. "José Maria Martín! Stand up! -- "Stand up, ye son-of-a-bitch" / Walker Dixon Grisso -- Why wilderness? / Ed Abbey -- "The dirty nincompoop who edits that journal" -- "To the world!!" / James W. Nesmith -- "I ask: what is life?" / Herman W. Knickerbocker -- Fiction. The rules of the game / Charles Lummis -- The outcasts of Poker Flat / Bret Harte -- The bride comes to Yellow Sky / Stephen Crane -- Cabin fever / Dorothy Scarborough -- "It must be something exciting" / Wallace Stegner -- McTeague / Frank Norris.