"Norton paperback"--Title page verso. Includes bibliographical references (pages 369-384) and index.

Empire of innocence -- Property values -- Denial and dependence -- Uncertain enterprises -- The meeting ground of past and present -- The persistence of natives -- America the borderland -- Racialism ion the run -- Mankind the manager -- The burdens of western American history. The "settling" of the American West has been powerfully perceived throughout the world as a series of quaint, violent, and romantic adventuresmost withhappy endings and a process that came to an end with the "closing" of thefrontier in the 1890s. But in fact, Patricia Nelson Limerick argues, the AmericanWest has a history grounded in primary economic realityin hardheaded questionsof profit, loss, competition, and consolidation. In The Legacy of Conquest, she interprets the stories and the characters in a new way: the trappers, traders, Indians, farmers, oilmen, cowboys, and sheriffs of the Old West "meant business"in more ways than one, and their descendents mean business today.