- Himself - Narrator: The West stretches from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, from the north plains to the Rio Grande- more than two million square miles of the most extraordinary landscape on Earth. Its terrain has always beckoned, and repelled. It is a land of almost impenetrable mountain barriers: the Rockies and Wasatch, the Bitterroots and Bighorns, the Sierra Nevada and Sangre de Cristo, the Confusions, the Crazies and the Black Hills. It is a land of rivers: the Colorado and Colombia and Missouri, the Sweetwater and the Platte, Sand Creek and the Greasy Grass, the River that Scolds All Others and the River of No Return.
- Himself - Narrator: The Comanches said they came from swirls of dust. The Hidatsa, from the bottom of a big lake. Among the sacred bundles of the Zunis was a stone, they said, within which beats the heart of the world.