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The epic of American expansion has had many chroniclers. Romance is wedded to heroism and rich achievement crowned high endeavor. In this present volume is woven the golden thread of that romantic and heroic era. Here, on these pages, live again the mighty men of those epoch-making days when the forces of manhood were matched against the forces of nature, valor against villainy, and life itself was ventured on a single hazard of fortune. Nurtured, many of them, in the calm and quiet of the more settled East, they dreamed as youths of those plains and mountains "out where the West begins." They matched their wits against the crafty red man and their strength against the perils and privations of a trackless wilderness. With the might to conquer they triumphed over heat and cold, over foe and famine, over storm and starvation, and made Death Valley a highway to the shores of the Pacific - where the West ends. The record which these pages unfold could be written only by a man who knows the West, and who, though himself an Easterner, feels akin with the spirit of the pioneer. Countless pages have been scanned for an accurate record of those men and times and for verification of the stirring incidents recited here. Numerous interviews and prolonged research have enabled the author to present a stirring, vivid picture of glamorous years and of valorous men who undeterred by danger and unafraid of death wrought mighty deeds and opened vast areas to commerce and civilization.