historian William C. Davis masterfully chronicles the history of the territory beyond the Mississippi, with particular attention to exploration, expansion, conflict, and settlement. The first bold steps of Lewis and Clark in 1804 inspired the emergence of a nation in a momentous century of migration and settlement. During the next few decades, while Texas and California fought to be free of Mexican rule, the slow spread westward began: the Mormons in Utah, the '49ers in California, and the development of stage routes, railways, and other overland trails. With the end of the Civil War, in 1865, people of all nations and tongues sped to the West--the pioneers, trappers, entrepreneurs, buffalo hunters, miners, soldiers, gamblers, cowboys, lawmen, gunfighters.