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This is an expansive history of about sixty years, across a fair amount of space.

It’s also a fairly limited history, largely confined to what “white people” were doing. This is, in large part, man-vs-nature history, with strange people coming into a strange place and having all sorts of adventures. This is entirely about the early exploration and expansion of Anglo-American culture across four states of the US. Stone does take time to note that there’s just no written sources available from the Chinese who worked on the railroads being built through here. And that objection would also hold true for a lot of the previous inhabitants of the region. And this is a flowing narrative history, not in the least bit technical and willing to go into the weeds of population levels and other non-written evidence.

Certainly, there is a lot to cover here as it is. A good chunk of the book is dominated by the various discoveries of gold and silver that dominate the initial settlement of the region. Places where a few men found something valuable, and instantly, or so it would seem, towns sprang up. Many of the immediate places would go away again when the strikes ran out, but not all, and of course, the mineral wealth built other places as well, most notably San Francisco. The development of the Bay Area is one of several threads running through the entire book.

Later portions deal with the railroads, and the chokehold the Southern Pacific had on much of California’s economy. One of the more amusing chapters near the end deals with the Santa Fe finally gaining access to southern California, and the subsequent free-fall of passenger ticket prices from $100 to $25 (with a dip all the way down to $1).

Much of the earlier parts of course deal with problems of individual expeditions and bands of settlers trying to cross the region at all. It isn’t a coherent account of things like the Oregon Trail at all (that one especially, as Oregon is out of Stone’s scope). But there is enough to contextualize a lot of these early struggles.

Organizationally, it is interesting that Stone very much sets his book only in modern California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. Events that take place outside these borders are barely touched on at all. The book is not formally divided up into these four states as well, but Stone does very much keep them in mind, and certainly groups things in accordance with those borders.