For the first time in paperback comes the magnificent illustrated companion volume to the landmark PBS television series, featuring 400+ illustrations, many in full color. In a vivid narrative that begins with the arrival of the first Europeans and ends well into the 20th century, Ward provides a gripping journey through the turbulent history of the region that has come to symbolize America around the world. Drawing upon hundreds of letters, diaries, memoirs, and journals as well as the latest scholarship, The West chronicles the arrival of wave after wave of newcomers from every direction of the compass.  The cast is as rich and diverse as the western landscape itself—explorers, soldiers, Indian warriors, settlers, railroad builders and gaudy showmen. Coronado, Custer, Jesse James, Chief Joseph, Brigham Young and Buffalo Bill are all here. So are scores of lesser-known westerners whose stories are no less compelling—a Chinese ditchdigger. a rich Mexican landowner, a forty-niner from Chile, a Texas cowboy born in Britain, a woman missionary to the Native Americans who loathed the West and a Wellesley graduate who loved it in spite of everything it did to her and her family. It is the central story of America, a story filled with heroism and hope, enterprise and adventure as well as tragedy and disappointment.  The West explores the tensions between whites and the native peoples they sought to displace, but it also encompasses the Hispanic experience in the West from the time of the conquistadors to the transformation of a Mexican-American village called Los Angeles into the region's major metropolis, the lives of Chinese immigrants who called the region “Gold Mountain”, and the ordeals of freed slaves from the South who sought a better life homesteading on the Great Plains.  Beautifully written, richly illustrated, meticulously researched, The West tells the story of a unique part of the country and provides a metaphor for the country as a whole. "Geoffrey C. Ward, historian, screenwriter, and former editor of American Heritage, is the coauthor of The Civil War and Baseball. He also cowrote (with Dayton Duncan) the script for the documentary television series The West, which was edited and coproduced by Ken Burns. Mr. Ward's other books include A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, which won the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography and the 1990 Francis Parkman Prize awarded by the Society of American Historians." Preface In a conversation with us several years ago, the Kiowa poet N. Scott Momaday remarked that the American West is "a dream. It is what people who have come here from the beginning of time have dreamed. . . . It is a landscape that has to be seen to be believed, and may have to be believed in order to be seen." For five years we have traveled that landscape, photographed its vistas, talked to its people, sought out its history, all as part of our production of The West, an eight-part documentary series for public television. Now "100,000 airmiles, 72 filmed interviews, 74 visits to archives and collections, and more than 250 hours of film later "we have begun to understand at least something of what Momaday meant. In the West, everything seems somehow larger than life, and we now can see why so many different peoples have come to consider their own innermost lives inextricably linked with it. Over the centuries, the West has been the repository of the dreams of an astonishing variety of people "and it has been on the long, dusty roads of the West that those dreams have crisscrossed and collided, transforming all who traveled along them, rewarding some while disappointing others. The story of the West was once told as an unbroken series of triumphs "the victory of "civilization" over "barbarism," a relentlessly inspirational epic in which greed and cruelty were often glossed over as enterprise and courage. Later, that epic would be turned upside down by some, so that the story of the West became another "equally misleading "morality tale, one in which the crimes of conquest and dispossession were allowed to overshadow everything else that ever happened beyond the Mississippi. The truth about the West is far more complicated, and much more compelling. America without the West is unthinkable now. Yet there was nothing inevitable about our taking of it. Others had prior claim to its vastness, after all, and we could quite easily have remained forever huddled east of the Mississippi. In resolving to move west and become a continental nation we would exact a fearful price from those already living on the land. But we also became a different people, and it is no accident that that turbulent history "and the myths that have grown up around it "has made the West the most potent symbol of the nation as a whole, overseas as well as in our own hearts. Of course, no film series, no book "no library of books, for that matter "can ever encompass the