The American West was a notion, not a nation. It was a process, not a place. The native animal and human life of the West was displaced, replaced, and exterminated- sixty million bison to make way for European bog animals, billions of passenger pigeons for nothing, and ninety percent of aboriginal native Americans, out of an original population of possibly a hundred million, by accident and design.
Late in the summer of 2013, I set out to find the Old West, what it had been, and what had replaced it. The quest for my own wild panorama would turn wheels of fortune into a movable feast of Wagon Days. And if this don’t get your fire started, your wood’s wet.
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