Into the West: The Story of Its People Hardcover - 1999

From the publisher

This is a full-scale history of the people of the American West, from the ancestral Paleo-Indians, to the Spanish conquistadores and settlers, to the gold rushers, to the myriads who came from every direction in the twentieth century, right up to the late 1990s. Everyone is here -- whites from all over Europe and the United States, Latinos, Asians, African-Americans, and Native Americans. Some went west to homestead; others to find gold or, later, oil or the wealth of Silicon Valley; others followed California dreams, some out of Old West mythology; still others simply came to make better lives. This is a story of those millions who came -- on foot, on horseback, in wagons, by train, by car, by plane -- into the West.

Walter Nugent offers a new and fascinating perspective on all the groups who settled and transformed the region. He explains how California became not only the most urban state in the West but also the most populous and most ethnically mixed state in the country. He explores such questions as why African-Americans in the early 1900s regarded Oakland and Denver as more tolerant than San Francisco or Los Angeles; what happened to the second generation of Mormons after the large western migration of the 1840s; who the real "Dust Bowl migrants" of the 1930s were; and how the New Deal, as well as federal laws on homesteading, irrigation, defense, and immigration, changed the face of the West.

Finally, Nugent examines the West of today: why the coastal and Sunbelt West and the interior West are experiencing such a radical cultural divergence. And he tells us what he projects, on the basis of recent trends, is likely to happen to the people of the West in the next half century.