Men to Match My Mountains: The Opening of the Far West 1840-1900

Irving Stone is known more as a novelist than a historian. Consequently some serious historians have relegated this book to the realm of popular blather. But in spite of the fact that the book is entertaining and readable it is also serious history. Stone conducted extensive research and produced a masterpiece. It has been continuously in print for over 40 years. Its pages encompass the mountain west from Colorado to California and it is populated with heroes, visionaries, eccentrics and rogues. A must have book to be enjoyed again and again.

I agree with the previous reviews so I will not duplicate their effort. I too want to emphasize that this book's strength is in its wonderful telling of the stories of western expansion that many Americans know only a piece of. It is an excellent survey with enough detail to do justice to the individual episodes without getting bogged down. Each subject in the book has been treated in more detail elsewhere; where this book shines is in covering them all and deftly weaving them together to give a portrait of 19th-century western America. I think those of us who live in California especially appreciate learning about the people for whom much of our landscape is named. Read it and tell your friends about it.

A great deal of primary and secondary research shows in Men to Match My Mountains. The hard work and attention to detail which Irving Stone put into this work is evident. Far from being the typical boring history text, Men to Match My Mountains is liberally salted with amusing anecdotes and captivating details of the lives of those who first settled California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado. Most of what we know about the West comes from the "cowboy" legends and myths, but Stone focuses on the gold and silver rushes and the Mormon settlement of Utah as the main reasons people went West.

I loved this book. Having lived in California since 1948, I thought I knew a lot about our history. How wrong I was. This was an extremely difficult book to put down. I learned more about how the West was settled than I learned in all my history classes in High School and College put together. Besides being very factual, this book is extremely easy reading. I've passed this book on the many friends (all native Californians) and they all loved it. Extremely informative on the settlement of Utah (and other parts of the West) by the Mormons. It was also very interesting to learn about the mining in Colorado after California's Gold Rush. If you live and love the West Coast, you must read this book.