Book excerpt: Revised and expanded edition of Jon E. Lewis's ever-popular account of the American West. The book is at once a history and a compendium of western lore. It tells what life on the frontier was really like and gives a human portrait of the tough and sometimes violent way of life experienced by the early pioneers. The gunfighters and the cowboys, women, Indians and others, all have their part to play - and as well as the historical accounts there are intriguing anecdotes of everyday life on the plains, from how Montana cowboys warmed up their horses' bits, to the words of the Navajo medicine chants.