How the West Was Won

How the West Was Won is a novel by the American writer Louis L'Amour, published in 1963. It follows a group of families and the people around them across the westward expansion of the United States.

The book begins with the journey itself, which is made by river and by wagon train, and it gives a good deal of attention to the distances involved: the Great Plains, and the passes of the Sierra Nevada that had to be crossed to reach the far side of the continent.

Among the travellers is Linus Rawlings, a restless survivor of Indian country who went east to see the ocean and found that his heart and his home were behind him in the West. Lilith Prescott is another, a woman who left her family and fell in love with a gambling man in the middle of a frontier gold boom.

The novel brings their paths together and sets them against hard country and the people who were already living in it, and it tells the story through a large cast rather than a single hero.