pt. 1. New Mexico's mystery stone / Dixie L. Perkins --
The message in the bottle / George Winship --
Drake's brass plaque / James D. Hart --
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 --
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 murder of Narbona / Franc Johnson Newcomb --
The hogan / Gladys Reichard --
Laughing Boy / Oliver La Farge --
The death of Old Man Hat / Walter Dyk --
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 --
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 --
"Wuite 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 flower --
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 --
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 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 --
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 --
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 --
"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 --
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 --
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
Horace Greeley's wild ride /
What the travel agent doesn't tell you / H.M. Chittenden --
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 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 --
"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 --
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 --