The West stretches from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, from the northern plains to the Rio Grande – more than two million square miles of the most extraordinary landscape on earth.

It is a land of broad rivers and vast deserts, deep canyons and impenetrable mountains, boundless prairies and endless forests, a place where towering monoliths and boiling waters rise naturally from the earth.

The Grandest Enterprise Under God

A triumph of the human spirit, the transcontinental railroad opens a new era in the West, carrying homesteaders onto the prairies, bringing cowboys up the cattle trail from Texas, helping give women the vote in Utah and sending buffalo hunters onto the plains, where they drive a symbol of the West – and a way of life – to the brink of extinction.

PBS The West