Pt. 1. In the beginning ... : New Mexico's mystery stone / Dixie L. Perkins ; The message in the bottle / George Winship ; Drake's brass plaque / James D. Hart ; The real Manila galleon ; The long way home / Meriwether Lewis ; 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

pt. 2. The original westerners: 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"

pt. 3. The Navajos: The murder of Narbona / Franc Johnson Newcomb ; Barboncito's plea ; The hogan / Gladys Reichard ; Laughing Boy / Oliver La Farge ; The death of Old Man Hat / Walter Dyk

pt. 4. The Hispanos: 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

pt. 5. Frontier life: 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

pt. 6. Cowboys: 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 cowboy strike / David Dary ; The first rodeos / Charles Nordhoff ; The chuck wagon / Eugene Manlove Rhodes ; When you call me that, smile! / Owen Wister

pt. 7. 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"

pt. 8. 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 ; Unlce Dick Wootton / Agnes Morley Cleaveland ; Culture comes to Virginia City / R.D. Miller

pt. 9. The mines: Gold only waiting to be gathered up / Paul Horgan ; "Something shining in the bottom of the dicth" / James W. Marshall ; "Men living like coyotes" / J. Ross Browne ; Sutro's tunnel ; 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

pt. 10. Women: "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

pt. 11. Law and disorder: 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

pt. 12. Travel: 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 ; Hrace Greeley's wild ride / Artemus Ward ; What the travel agent doesn't tell you / H.M. Chittenden ; Cold feet ; 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

pt. 13: The military: 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 lett home / George Armstrong Custer ; Mrs. Custer hears the news / Elizabeth Custer

pt. 14. The Western way with words: "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

pt. 15. Fiction: 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 ; McTeague / Frank Norris.