Overall, Werewolf: the Wild West has a lot of missed opportunities and a few strange choices made, but is generally a solid book, despite these flaws.

First, the good: the opening fiction is excellent. It has a very strong Canterbury Tales vibe to it, and I was a bit disappointed that after the opening the characters in it were never mentioned again, when they would have been great running examples. Another nice thing was that it actually mentioned the Native Tribes working with Dreamspeaker Kinfolk! This actually tries (though doesn't super-well) to address one of my running criticisms of Werewolf. The other truly excellent thing is Storm-Eater/The Storm Umbra, creating a unique environment for gameplay.

Now, the bad: there's a LOT of Noble Savage in this book. A painful amount. The claim that the Weaver and Wyrm were basically absent from pre-Colombian America is bad. For one, Cahokia, the Incas and Aztecs, the Iroquois Confederation (not pre-Colombian, but more-or-less pre-contact), the Dine, and others all existed and were complex societies, indicating the Weaver (hell, Teotihuacan was one of the largest cities on the planet) and as for the Wyrm, you have all sorts of awful things going on. They even mention a "web of power" that bound Storm-Eater, which screams Weaver (and could tie into the cosmology). Another bad point on this is that there was no direct mention of the Trail of Tears, somehow!

Other than that, my complaints are mostly minor: grammatical and layout errors exist, some aspects of Werewolf cosmology make no sense, etc.

This is a great book. All the information you need for setting your Werewolf campaign during the 19th century. The book has many built-in rivalries, giving the impression of the tribes killing each other much more often than working together.

New Gifts, and Rites. And the mechanics of this match up with Werewolf 3rd edition. Starting with no character concept, I found the description of the tribes, and examples of common members, to be very inspiring with character concept and generation coming together very fast.