I spotted this book at the library near the check-out desk and grabbed it-the subtitle, The Frontier photography of William Henry Jackson, sounded like something I could pick up and browse in between tasks (this was between Thanksgiving and Christmas). I have a grown son in California and a grown daughter who is a photographer and who travels the world pursuing new vistas for her camera. I am buying her this book as it resonates with the kind of tale she has told me of her adventures. It is described as juvenile literature, which is all well and true because the language is accessible to junior-high-aged children, but nevertheless regrettable because perhaps most adults will therefore never consider reading it. Yet the writing, the concepts, and above all the photography are so full of the beauty, the optimism, the struggles and challenges of our nation in the nineteenth century as we grew from a rural thinly populated mainly eastern seaboard land to a multiethnic, continental, industrial society that I found it entirely engrossing. All these social and cultural threads weave through the narrative painlessly, and the glory of the photos of life and nature and the real people I have always heard (only as names in history books) at the time of the conquering of the west are reason you keep turning those pages.