New in paperbackWhat was achieved and destroyed, what was made up and forgotten in the American West as the continent was mapped, the natives were displaced, and exploits were transformed into legends? In this acclaimed collection, Larry McMurtry profiles explorers and martyrs, hucksters and scholars--figures in the West's enduring yet ever-shifting mixture of myth and reality.In these twelve pieces, McMurtry explores John Wesley Powell's journey on the Colorado, the dispossession of the Five Civilized Tribes, the fascination the Zuni held over a parade of unscrupulous anthropologists, and--in the bicentennial of their journey--the journals of Lewis and Clark, "our only really American epic."

    Approximately 140 people were slaughtered; only 17 children under the age of eight were spared. This incident in an open field called Mountain Meadows has ever since been the focus of passionate debate: Is it possible that official Mormon dignitaries were responsible for the massacre? In her riveting book, Sally Denton makes a fiercely convincing argument that they were.The author–herself of Mormon descent–first traces the extraordinary emergence of the Mormons and the little-known nineteenth-century intrigues and tensions between their leaders and the U.S. government, fueled by the Mormons’ zealotry and exclusionary practices. We see how by 1857 they were unique as a religious group in ruling an entire American territory, Utah, and commanding their own exclusive government and army. Denton makes clear that in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the church began placing the blame on a discredited Mormon, John D. Lee, and on various Native Americans. She cites contemporaneous records and newly discovered documents to support her argument that, in fact, the Mormon leader, Brigham Young, bore significant responsibility–that Young, impelled by the church’s financial crises, facing increasingly intense scrutiny and condemnation by the federal government, incited the crime by both word and deed.Finally, Denton explains how the rapidly expanding and enormously rich Mormon church of today still struggles to absolve itself of responsibility for what may well be an act of religious fanaticism unparalleled in the annals of American history. American Massacre is totally absorbing in its narrative as it brings to life a tragic moment in our history.

    Each of the ten chapters is a virtual time capsule which reminds, as we plunge headlong into the future, of the richness and importance of our past. Illustrations throughout.

    In the summer of 1877, General Oliver Otis Howard, a champion of African American civil rights, ruthlessly pursued hundreds of Nez Perce families who resisted moving onto a reservation. Standing in his way was Chief Joseph, a young leader who never stopped advocating for Native American sovereignty and equal rights. Thunder in the Mountains is the spellbinding story of two legendary figures and their epic clash of ideas about the meaning of freedom and the role of government in American life.

    Green has rounded up fifteen new yarns filled with the ornery yet irresistible style that has earned his books a place in classic Western Americana. Some More Horse Tradin’ recounts the dealings of a whole slew of craggy old-timers and rangy characters. See them match wits as they trade well-bred mares, snorty-like range colts, and used-to-be-bad horses from the tumbleweed plains. Admire the old-time knavery, skill, and salesmanship in such tales as “Gittin’ Even,” “Brethren Horse Traders,” “Mule Schoolin’,” and “Water Treatment and the Sore-Tailed Bronc.” Ride along with Green, and he’ll tell you what he knows about horseflesh--but keep your wits about you, and hang on to your wallet.

    Deadwood Dick, Mary Fields, a.k.a. Stagecoach Mary, Cranford Goldsby, a.k.a. Cherokee Bill—and a host of other intrepid men and women who marched into the wilderness alongside Chief Osceola, Billy the Kid, and Geronimo.Featuring captivating narratives and photographs (many from the author’s world-famous collection), The Black West enriches and deepens our stirring frontier saga. From slave runaways during the colonial era, to the journeys of Lewis and Clark, to the charge at San Juan Hill, Katz vividly recounts the crucial contributions African Americans made during scores of frontier encounters. With its stirring pictures and vivid eyewitness accounts, The Black West is an exhilarating treasure trove.

     They terrorized the towns and countryside across the West, robbing banks, committing murders, holding up stage coaches and stealing from helpless citizens. The story of these infamous villains begins with the outbreak of the American Civil War when the Younger brothers signed up for the Confederacy to fight in Quantrill’s vicious band of guerrillas. Buel takes the reader through the actions undertaken by the group as they fought for the South in quick lightning strikes against the armies of the North, developing tactics that would come in useful in their later lives. After the end of the war Buel explains how the gang slipped effortlessly from guerrilla warfare to bank robberies, evading capture and killing opponents. They could not evade lawmen and vigilantes forever, Buel explains in vivid detail the gang’s eventual demise. The Border Outlaws is essential reading for anyone interested in the American Civil War and the actions of Quantrill’s raiders as well as outlaws of the Old West. The authority of this work is explain by Paul Iselin Wellman in A Dynasty of Western Outlaws: “This may be the first of the books published about the James and Younger outlaws … Buel had no illusions about them. He names names and quotes dates. At times he includes contemporary newspaper accounts. At others he cites correspondence of the outlaws themselves, to relatives or friends, and in some instances to himself.” “It is the best source material we have.” Outlaws on Horseback, Harry Sinclair Drago James W. Buel was a journalist, based initially in Kansas City and later in St. Louis. He wrote over fifty books during his lifetime on the wilds of Africa and the American West. The Border Outlaws was first published in 1881. He died in San Diego, California, in 1920.

    She recalls her childhood in a sod house on a frontier that required everyone to pull together in the face of hostile weather, serious illness, and economic depression but that also held its full share of good times. "As a child of seven and up," writes Grace Snyder, ". . . I wished that I might grow up to make the most beautiful quilts in the world, to marry a cowboy, and to look down on the top of a cloud. At the time I dreamed those dreams and wished those wishes, it seemed impossible that any of them could every come true." But she saw all of them realized.No Time on My Hands is a remarkable chronicle of the sod house era and of Grace Snyder’s married life on a ranch in Nebraska’s sandhills. From there she finally flies above the clouds to exhibits where her quilts contribute to a worldwide revival of quiltmaking. Mrs. Snyder lived twenty years after the publication of these memoirs in 1963, to the age of one hundred. Her daughter, Nellie Snyder Yost, who helped to write No Time on My Hands, has added an epilogue to this Bison edition.

    This best-selling title, designed to be either the primary anthology or textbook for the course, covers the Civil War's entire chronological span with a series of documents and essays.

    It encompasses politics, military history, economics, the arts, science, fashion, fads, social change, sexual mores, communications, graffiti - everything and anything indigenous that can be captured in print.Masterfully compressing four crowded decades of our history, The Glory and the Dream relives the epic, significant, or just memorable events that befell the generation of Americans whose lives pivoted between the America before and the America after the Second World War. From the Great Depression through the second inauguration of Richard M. Nixon, Manchester breathes life into this great period of America's growth.

     BOOK EXCERPT: By the time Hugh Glass reached Fort Tilton it was well into November. A foot of snow lay across the countryside. Fort Tilton was a small fort that belonged to the Columbia Fur Company. It had been built by William P. Tilton and boasted a garrison of only five men. As it sat near the site of another Mandan village, the Mandans who escorted Hugh dropped him off, then immediately went to visit their cousins. Hugh went to see Tilton, where he learned right away that any hopes of finding a boat to continue his journey were in vain. “Mr. Glass,” Tilton told Hugh, “I’d like to help you but I can’t. I’ve got five men here, besides myself. I can’t spare any of them. We’re under danger of attack here night and day by the Arikaras. I need every man I have to keep them away. Even if I could spare anyone, I doubt they would go. We’re watched constantly. I had one man who left the fort for only a few minutes. From out of nowhere, that devil Stanapat rode up and killed him, practically on our doorstep. If you hadn’t had the Mandans escorting you, don’t think for a moment that you would have made it in here. Those damn Arikaras would have gotten you before you even came within sight of the fort.” Disappointed, Hugh exhaled heavily. “Stanapat,” he said ruefully. “—The Little Hawk With The Bloody Hand…” Tilton looked at him. “You speak Arikara?” he asked Hugh. “Pawnee,” Hugh said absently. “The two languages are almost identical.” Tilton continued to stare at him. Slowly, a look of dread came over his features. “Oh no,” Tilton said. “Oh, Christ, I should have known by your scars—you’re the one the Indians call White Bear.” Hugh gave him a puzzled look. “How did you know?” “Mister, you’re the talk of the plains. BIG medicine. Went one on one with a grizzly, left for dead by two white men and still managed to crawl to Fort Kiowa. The Arikaras have tried to kill you and can’t, that’s what they say. Oh, I know all about you. So does every tribe from here to the Rockies. As soon as Stanapat finds out you’re here—and he will—he’ll tear this place down to get to you. New travels real fast in these parts, mister, and the news here is that the Arikaras want you real bad!” PRAISE FOR "HUGH GLASS" by Bruce Bradley-- "--The kind of book you hate to put down!" Fraser Whitbread - Muzzle Blasts Magazine "This recent book by Bruce Bradley is a great read and should be added to the library of those who have interest in the (Fur Trade) period or are an over-all student of early American History." - On the Trail Magazine "A very readable telling of an amazing story!" —Bob Griffith-Amazon.com

    Across the Wide Missouri tells the compelling story of the climax and decline of the Rocky Mountain fur trade during the 1830s. More than a history, it portrays the mountain fur trade as a way of business and a way of life, vividly illustrating how it shaped the expansion of the American West.

    In American Exceptionalism: An Experiment in History, Charles Murray describes how America's geography, ideology, politics, and daily life set the new nation apart from Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. He then discusses the ways that exceptionalism changed during America's evolution over the course of the 20th century. Which changes are gains to be applauded? Which are losses to be mourned? Answering these questions is the essential first step in discovering what you want for America's future.

    Henry Nash Smith shows, with vast comprehension, the influence of the nineteenth-century West in all its variety and strength, in special relation to social, economic, cultural, and political forces. He traces the myths and symbols of the Westward movement such as the general notion of a Westward-moving Course of Empire, the Wild Western hero, the virtuous yeoman-farmer--in such varied nineteenth-century writings as Leaves of Grass, the great corpus of Dime Novels, and most notably, Frederick Jackson Turner's The Frontier in American History. Moreover, he synthesizes the imaginative expression of Western myths and symbols in literature with their role in contemporary politics, economics, and society, embodied in such forms as the idea of Manifest Destiny, the conflict in the American mind between idealizations of primitivism on the one hand and of progress and civilization on the other, the Homestead Act of 1862, and public-land policy after the Civil War.The myths of the American West that found their expression in nineteenth-century words and deeds remain a part of every American's heritage, and Smith, with his insight into their power and significance, makes possible a critical appreciation of that heritage.

    More than 75 years after his vanishing, Ruess stirs the kinds of passion and speculation accorded such legendary doomed American adventurers as Into the Wild’s Chris McCandless and Amelia Earhart. “I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the street car and the star sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities.”  So Everett Ruess wrote in his last letter to his brother. And earlier, in a valedictory poem, ”Say that I starved; that I was lost and weary; That I was burned and blinded by the desert sun; Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases; Lonely and wet and cold . . . but that I kept my dream!"                                              Wandering alone with burros and pack horses through California and the Southwest for five years in the early 1930s, on voyages lasting as long as ten months, Ruess also became friends with photographers Edward Weston and Dorothea Lange, swapped prints with Ansel Adams, took part in a Hopi ceremony, learned to speak Navajo, and was among the first "outsiders" to venture deeply into what was then (and to some extent still is) largely a little-known wilderness.  When he vanished without a trace in November 1934, Ruess left behind thousands of pages of journals, letters, and poems, as well as more than a hundred watercolor paintings and blockprint engravings. A Ruess mystique, initiated by his parents but soon enlarged by readers and critics who, struck by his remarkable connection to the wild, likened him to a fledgling John Muir. Today, the Ruess cult has more adherents—and more passionate ones—than at any time in the seven-plus decades since his disappearance. By now, Everett Ruess is hailed as a paragon of solo exploration, while the mystery of his death remains one of the greatest riddles in the annals of American adventure. David Roberts began probing the life and death of Everett Ruess for National Geographic Adventure magazine in 1998. Finding Everett Ruess is the result of his personal journeys into the remote areas explored by Ruess, his interviews with oldtimers who encountered the young vagabond and with Ruess’s closest living relatives, and his deep immersion in Ruess’s writings and artwork.  It is an epic narrative of a driven and acutely perceptive young adventurer’s expeditions into the wildernesses of landscape and self-discovery, as well as an absorbing investigation of the continuing mystery of his disappearance.  In this definitive account of Ruess's extraordinary life and the enigma of his vanishing, David Roberts eloquently captures Ruess's tragic genius and ongoing fascination.