"He was just an old bachelor, and he just come and went as he pleased," said Ila Powell, describing one of a thousand different types--from gunslingers to surveyors--who roamed about the early West. It was a time when violence erupted in the boomtowns and the mining frontier, where everyone was a crack shot, lawmen quested fearlessly, and desperados roamed. Trappers, traders, explorers, speculators, gamblers, military men and laborers. Love of adventure drove most men during the exciting first half of the nineteenth century. The yearning to go beyond what civilization had to offer, to see what existed on the other side of the boundaries, was matched by a country so vast as to offer up one new terrain after another, from Missouri and Louisiana to Oregon country and California. With over a hundred photographs and quotes from hundreds of diaries and journals, Men of the West brings to life the individual tales of the epic western heroes.