The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West - Softcover

"In stripping the frontier of kitsch fantasy, Patricia Limerick has prised us away from an Ivy League model of a land of conquest and open opportunity. She offers instead the earthy, uncomfortable reality of a living west." The Guardian"

The "settling" of the American West has been perceived throughout the world as a series of quaint, violent, and romantic adventures. But in fact, Patricia Nelson Limerick argues, the West has a history grounded primarily in economic reality; in hardheaded questions of profit, loss, competition, and consolidation. Here she interprets the stories and the characters in a new way: the trappers, traders, Indians, farmers, oilmen, cowboys, and sheriffs of the Old West "meant business" in more ways than one, and their descendents mean business today.