Distant horizon

From Thomas Hart Benton's famous speech in the Senate when he argued that nonwhite civilizations must fall before the western expansion of white Americans to Black Elk's story of a way of life lost on the frozen ground at Wounded Knee, Gary Noy offers a representative sampling of the many Wests that historians have struggled to define for over a century. Distant Horizon chronicles the dusty world of the cowboy, the hardscrabble existence of the farmer and the settler, and the miner's vision of golden glory. It examines the independent nature of the explorer and mountain man and the sometimes…