Richard White, historian, guest commentator: The (American) West is about possibilities. And sometimes the price of success of one group's possibilities is going to be the ending of possibilities for another group. Americans aren't wrong in seeing the West as the land of the future, of seeing a land in which astonishing things are possible. What they often are wrong about is that there's no price to be paid for that (success)--that everybody can succeed or that even what succeeds is necessarily the best for everyone concerned. The West is much more complicated than that.