When we think of the American West, we tend to conjure up images that are known the world over: bearded forty-niners leading pack mules up a mountain trail, the Oklahoma land stampede, Custer's Last Stand, and especially the range-riding, quick-shooting cowboy. But these familiar images are only a small part of a story that stretches across centuries and embraces many voices and contrasting cultures.

Lavishly illustrated and based on the finest scholarship, The Oxford History of the American West is the first comprehensive study to do full justice to the rich complexity of this region. It brings together the work of twenty-eight leading western historians who explore this area from a dazzling number of perspectives. Providing distinctive portraits of all the peoples of the West, and following the frontier as it moves across terrains ranging from the Dakota Badlands to the icy cliffs of Glacier Bay, Alaska, this lively volume discusses economics, politics, family life, and popular culture (including the West in fiction and in art), continually challenging the familiar as it broadens the reader's understanding of a vast and varied region.

When originally published in 1925, one reviewer called "Forty Years on the Frontier" "the odyssey of a nineteenth-century Ulysses." In 1852, Granville Stuart (1834-1918) traveled with his brother and their father to the Sacramento Valley of California, where they spent five years mining for gold and served in the Rogue River War. In 1857 he and his brother started back to Iowa but were delayed by the outbreak of war between the Utah Mormons and the United States. After relocating to Montana's Deer Lodge Valley, the Stuarts found gold, and news of their discovery sparked the first Montana gold rush in 1862. Stuart was instrumental in developing the Montana cattle industry and was a leader of the vigilantes who captured and executed numerous horse thieves in the summer of 1884. Stuart's edited reminiscences are a priceless and authentic account of pioneering, prospecting, and community building in the northern Rockies and Great Plains.