Sacagawea'S Nickname: Essays on the American West: Essays on the

What was achieved and destroyed, what was made up and forgotten in the American West as the continent was mapped, the natives were displaced, and exploits were transformed into legends? In this new collection, Larry McMurtry profiles explorers and martyrs, hucksters and scholars - figures in the West's enduring yet ever-shifting mixture of myth and reality. These twelve essays, all originally published in The New York Review of Books, range from Lewis and Clark's expedition on the Missouri River to John Wesley's Powell's on the Colorado. Here too are the inventors of western mythology: entertainers like Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley and pulp writers like Zane Grey. Once again Larry McMurtry casts a keen and elegiac eye not only on the often harsh truths of the West, but also on the power of western illusions, of what he calls that other, endlessly imagined West, the West that can never be fully believed or wholly denied.