In the American West, everything seems somehow larger, grander, more vast. It's easy to see why so many peoples have come to consider the American West their home.

The "story" of the West was once told as 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. Although the thought of America without the West is unthinkable now, there was nothing inevitable about it being "settled" by early Eurpoeans. As we know, 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 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 -- have made the West the most potent symbol of our nation.