Clashing stories haunt the physical and cultural landscapes of the American West, stories that led or kept people there, and that Europeans and Americans used to drive indigenous people away. Inasmuch as people believed them, stories are historical forces that demand interpretation and that, to a significant degree, explain the settlement and conquest of this vast and complex region. Books of fiction and religious faith; oral stories passed through generations; exaggerated travel accounts and the tall tales of boosterism; feverish fantasies of speculation and geographic mastery; and persistent Old World myths and allegories have all directly affected western migration and development. The West has, in other words, inextricably wedded what we conventionally refer to as the historical and the literary, the experiential and the imaginative.

The literature of the American West tells and retells the fictions and histories that have been born of this union and that in turn shape our perception and experience of the West. So intertwined are the facts of imagination and the facts of historical experience “out West” that their nominal difference can seem a mere disciplinary effect or convenience. Historians who give attention to the “imagined” West effectively demarcate it from the “real” West and so reinforce a disciplinary divide even as they cross it. One of my aims in this book is to demonstrate why literary and historical imaginations should not be thought about separately, and to employ an intertextual methodology that insists on bringing the two together by locating the historical in the literary and vice versa, rather than by treating one as the “background” of the other.