Beyond the Missouri: The Story of the American West By Richard W. Etulain

This was the main text book that was used for my graduate course in American Western history at Adams State. This book was read over the time frame of the whole class and was used each week to answer discussion questions. It was also used to compare views of different topics in the other books we also had to read for the course.

The book tries to cover a lot of ground. Sometimes it went into too much detail and at others not enough. This is a good base book for Western history students because of all of the subject matter it does cover. One of the things that stands out is how Etulain looks at how the stereotypes that we associate with the West developed and the impact that the media, authors, and movies had on these images over time. He also does cover the experiences of different cultural and religious groups. The book does include a good amount of pictures and maps to help people build images of what they are reading about. The one real negative that I saw with Etulain's book is that most of his resources were just other books. There was little use of primary source material, newspapers, or articles. I just felt he needed a little more diversity in his resources.

I think that this is a good book for instructors to use as an overarching book on the West, but it must be paired with others because it is very top level and to get a deeper understanding of Western history it just does not go into enough detail. No book can be everything on a subject so this is understandable. 4 stars out of 5 or a A-.