Story of the Great American West Hardcover – July 1, 1978

Was as expected

great diagrams and explanations, as well as, very informative.

Bought for my husband. He loves it.

A fascinating book, revealing, in 364 pages, the extraordinary push westward by pioneers who traveled mile after mile across the plains, then mountains and eventually reached the Pacific. The story is spelled out with hundreds of images, either photos, drawings, paintings, maps and several spread-wide color graphics of, for example, a cut-away of a steamboat, a covered wagon, panning for gold, or a sodbuster's family home.A clever editorial feature of the book is that each spread covers an individual subject rather than a continuous narrative throughout the book. The reader can dip into these pages with a mixture of bite-size text mixed together with relevant images (which all have captions).To give you an idea of how comprehensive the book is the eight pages of the Index have around 2240 entries. You can look inside the book at Westread Book Reviews then click 2022 and August.

I had this book as a kid it is great....would recommend to anyone wanting to give the kids a awesome gift to learn with

Perfect replacement for one of the books we lost when our basement got wet. Fast shipping and book was exactly as described.

The Reader's Digest `Story of the Great American West' is the one book you could want as a resource on the American West, so long as you can find one that is not ready to fall apart.It is far more encompassing and complete than Geoffrey Ward's book, ` The West: An Illustrated History .' Ward's book has its own charms: photography, layout, and writing being among them. There are plenty of illustrations here - about 1,000. What makes this book really stand out is that it contains the complete story of the Great American West. It tells the story of the trans-Appalachian settlement of America in two thirty-page chapters that Ward's book does not. George Rogers Clark, James Herrod, Ann Lindsay, and Daniel Boone are as representative of the American frontier as the mountain men, the pathfinders, the forty-niners, and the cattlemen.The traditional story of the west is all here, too, and a major part of the book. You can't tell the story of the West without Texas, the Mormons, the Gold Rush, the Mexican War, the Indian Wars, and the cattle drives. The omissions that I noted in Ward's book are represented here. There's a two-page story on Geronimo, a two-page list of villains of the west, and even a two-page story on the famous law & order men, too - including Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson.The entire book is actually a compilation of two-page stories. The left-side of the page and the right-side of the page are about one distinct topic. When you flip the page, you begin a new topic. It is often related to the page you just read, but there is a distinct breakpoint whenever you turn the page. Such a feature is great for a book like this, where it takes more than a few minutes to read each page.The material covered is broad, in terms of names, dates, and events, but not deep. You can find more in-depth coverage about the Nez Perce and the Battle of Wounded Knee in Geoffrey Ward's book, but he has no coverage of the Lincoln County War and the Johnson County War. Both county wars are covered here, although the one-paragraph sketch of the Lincoln County War has no mention of Lawrence Murphy and Jinglebob Chisum, the two main characters of the conflict. For this book - and for most people - the Lincoln County War is told in terms of Willam Bonney.The book also concludes with a chapter of the maturation of the west, which gives a nice conclusion to the story. There's some overlap with the Gilded Age, which is how history happens. The copper kings, the oil barons, and the corporate farmers are all outgrowths of frontier yeomen and prospectors. Populism formed as a political movement when the frontier ended, as did the conservation movement of John Muir, the Sierra club, and Theodore Roosevelt. These are all stories of the western frontier too.Because the book is more than thirty years old, and it was bound in particular way, the version that I read was starting to fall apart. This is one of those books that I'd like to see first before buying. Nevertheless, the content is magnificent. It is best story of the American West that I've read, and one of my favorite books about American History.

A copy of this book has been gathering dust on one of my shelves for many years. I am surprised few have noticed it.My interest in this period of the great American expansion across the continant began yearsa ago after my mother told my brothers and me that her family crossed the continent to be among the first americans to settle the west coast. They travelled by covered wagon with the first wagon trains and settled in Oregon but those from whom my mother is descended later moved up to Washington.This book is very well informative on its subject, extremely well organized, very well written, very well illustrated so even the youngest child will enjoy it.A must have for anyone interested in American history.