Part one: ancient stories. House made of the dawn / Washington Matthews
The woman and the horse / A.L. Kroeber
The girl who married the bear / Catharine McClellan
Coyote and eagle go to the land of the dead / Jarold Ramsey
How the ancient Peigans lived / C.C. Uhlenbeck
from Fools crow / James Welch
from The ghost-dance religion and the Sioux outbreak of 1890 / James Mooney
from Mean spirit / Linda Hogan
The last running / John Graves
Part two: transcending the western. Song of the redwood-tree / Walt Whitman
Buffalo Bill's / e.e. cummings
from Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales / D.H. Lawrence
from the Journals / Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
from The big sky / A.B. Guthrie Jr.
from We pointed them north, recollections of a cowpuncher / Teddy Blue Abbott
from Giants in the earth / O.E. Rölvaag
from Letters of a woman homesteader / Elinore Rupert Stewart
Carrion Spring / Wallace Stegner
from Old Jules / Mari Sandoz
The man who shot Liberty Valance / Dorothy M. Johnson
A raid on the oyster pirates / Jack London
The squatters' camps / John Steinbeck
Eagle valor, chicken mind / Robinson Jeffers
The Clark's Fork Valley, Wyoming / Ernest Hemingway
All morning ; The far field / Theodore Roethke
from A river runs through it / Norman Maclean
from Ceremony in Lone Tree / Wright Morris
If the owl calls again ; from Three days / John Haines
from This House of sky / Ivan Doig
Take my saddle from the wall: a valediction / Larry McMurtry
from All but the waltz / Mary Clearman Blew
Part three: our own stories. The west from the air / W.H. Auden
The bear / Galway Kinnell
Traveling through the dark ; Help from history ; Paso por aqui ; Late, passing prairie farm / William Stafford
A guide to Dungeness Spit / David Wagoner
from One flew over the cuckoo's nest / Ken Kesey
Legends, heroes, myth-figures and other American liars ; The pleasures of the Great Salt Lake ; Longing / Thomas McGrath
The poem politic 10: a note for future historians / Keith Wilson
from Desert solitaire / Edward Abbey
Above Pate Valley ; Painting the North San Juan School ; Getting in the wood ; Dillingham, Alaska, the Willow Tree Bar / Gary Snyder
Degrees of gray in Philipsburg ; The freaks at Surgin Road Field ; Silver star ; Driving Montana ; Fort Benton ; Duwamish ; Salt water story / Richard Hugo
Sierra Kid ; Soloing / Philip Levine
The hole ; The stones / Richard Shelton
American father / Maxine Hong Kingston
My father's life / Raymond Carver
Orphan calves / David Quammen
The heart of the game / Thomas McGuane
Paraiso: an elegy / Rick DeMarinis
Some names ; Blessing at the citadel / Greg Pape
Cougar meat ; The borrowed ones / Tess Gallagher
Part four: brilliant possibilities. To Robinson Jeffers / Czeslaw Milosz
from The names: a memoir / N. Scott Momaday
On the coast near Sausalito ; On Squaw Peak / Robert Hass
On water / Gretel Ehrlich
Storyteller / Leslie Marmon Silko
from Housekeeping / Marilynne Robinson
A passing ; Why lost divinity remains lost / Pattiann Rogers
Yellow light ; What for / Garrett Hongo
Ravens at Deer Creek ; Majestic / Robert Wrigley
The secret lion / Alberto Rios
from Martin / Jimmy Santiago Baca
Snakeskin (A dream) ; Talk with the priest / Ray Gonzalez
Water table ; Coming into his shop from a bright afternoon / James Galvin
The clan of One-Breasted Women / Terry Tempest Williams
The gifts of deer / Richard K. Nelson
In the ghetto on the prairie there is unrequited love ; Sometimes a warrior comes tired ; America loomed before us / Adrian C. Louis
The business of fancydancing ; My heroes have never been cowboys / Sherman Alexie
The passing wisdom of birds / Barry Lopez
A supermarket in California / Allen Ginsberg.
