Goldfield
The Last Gold Rush on The Western Frontier
By Sally Zanjani
“The discovery of Goldfield, Nevada, in 1902, along with the earlier discovery of Tonopah in 1900, marked the revival of mining in Nevada. Mining production, which had escalated after the discovery of the Comstock Lode in 1859, dropped to almost nothing with the decline of the Comstock in the 1870s. Without continued mining production, the state entered what proved to be a twenty-year depression period that ultimately led some observers to suggest that Nevada be deprived of its statehood.
Sea of Grass
By Conrad Richter
Richter’s novels and stories are filled with the fire of poetic prose and the drama of real lives. This is a reissue of the 1937 tale of cattle ranching on the high-grass plains of New Mexico at a time when a single man could control, if he were fierce enough, a ranch as big as some eastern seaboard states, but perhaps not hold the woman he loves as fiercely as the land.
Literature · Fiction · American Literature · Western Americana
Stories from Mesa Country
By Jane Candia Coleman
An excerpt from Stories from Mesa Country:“They are coming back from the burial ground. I can see them walking, two abreast, along the narrow track by the wash. Tom has his head down, his hands in the pockets of his black suit. Beside him, Reverend Sherman is talking, waving his arms, trying, I’d guess, to comfort. Behind them come Enid and Faith, square shapes in best blue dresses, and then Seth and Arch, leggy as colts, uncomfortable in Sunday suits, in the shadow of tragedy.
Tales Never Told Around the Campfire
True Stories of Frontier America
By Mark Dugan
Ten outlaws, ten states, ten stories of nineteenth-century fugitives remarkable because the events really took place. Mark Dugan’s latest outlaw chase reins in enough evidence to corral the cynics. There is new information on the strange relationship between Wild Bill Hickok, his enemy and victim, David McCanles, and the beautiful Sarah Shull of North Carolina. Was Tom Horn a hired killer for the big cattlemen in the unsolved Wyoming ambush? How much do we really know about Deputy U.S.
American History · Literature · Biography & Autobiography | General · Western Americana · History · Creative Nonfiction
Sunrise Brighter Still
The Visionary Novels of Frank Waters
By Alexander Blackburn
·
Foreword by Charles L. Adams
Novelist and critic Alexander Blackburn credits Waters’s novels such as The Man Who Killed the Deer, Pike’s Peak, People of the Valley, and The Woman at Otowi Crossing with creating a worldview that transcends modern materialism and rationalism. Central to Waters’s vision, he suggests, is the individual in whom are concentrated the creative powers of the universe.
Literature · American Literature · Literary Criticism · Western Americana
Knight of the Road
The Life of Highwayman Ham White
By Mark Dugan
The American public has long been fascinated by the Old West and the so–called heroes that it produced. Even before the days of Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and the dime novel, the public’s heroes have always been somewhat tainted. Numerous stories of chivalry and gallantry have been accredited to outlaws, but all tales have been based upon folklore and legends. Mark Dugan, however, gives us a bona fide American Robin Hood with Ham White.
American History · American Studies · Western Americana · History
Treasure Tales of the Rockies
By Perry Eberhart
Here is a whopping collection of tales of lost mines and buried treasure to stir the blood of any adventurous spirit and to satisfy the most lively imagination. Maps and photos galore accompany the stories.Perry Eberhart gathered and researched almost 150 treasure tales and tells them with the same thoroughness, engaging style, and lively anecdotes that distinguish his other major contribution to Colorado lore and history: Guide to the Colorado Ghost Towns and Mining Camps.Treasure
Ghost Towns of the American West
By Robert Silverberg
With a historian’s attention to fact and a novelist’s gift for dramatic storytelling, celebrated science fiction author Robert Silverberg brings these adventures back to life in the rowdy splendor of their heyday in Ghost Towns of the American West.
Pilgrimage
A Journey Through Colorado’s History and Culture
By Stephen J. May
From Cripple Creek to the Santa Fe Trail, Mesa Verde to the mountain towns of Leadville and Steamboat Springs, Colorado provides travelers and natives with a spectrum of beauty that is both awesome and austere. Drawn by the lingering mystique of conquistadores and wild, hot-blooded boom-town mining camps, Stephen May takes us on a physical and spiritual journey, through a Colorado alive with a sense of its rich frontier history.Interweaving
Buckeye Rovers in the Gold Rush
An Edition of Two Diaries
By H. Lee Scamehorn
·
Edited by Edwin P. Banks and Jamie Lytle-Webb
When “California Fever” raced through southeastern Ohio in the spring of 1849, a number of residents of Athens County organized a cooperative venture for traveling overland to the mines. Known as the “Buckeye Rovers,” the company began its trip westward in early April. The Buckeye Rovers, along with thousands who traveled the overland route to California, endured numerous hardships and the seemingly constant threat of attacks from hostile Indians.
Literary Collections | Diaries & Journals · American History · 19th century · United States · Ohio and Regional · Western Americana · Gold Rush
The Buffalo Book
The Full Saga of the American Animal
By David A. Dary
The journals and memoirs of 19th century explorers and travelers in the American West often told of viewing buffalo massed together as far as the eye could see. This book appropriately covers the subject of the buffalo as extensively as that animal covered the plains. Other recent accounts of the buffalo have focused on two or three aspects, emphasizing its natural history, the hunters and the hunted in prehistoric time, the relationship between the buffalo and the American Indian.
Buckeye Rovers in the Gold Rush
An Edition of Two Diaries
By H. Lee Scamehorn
·
Edited by Edwin P. Banks and Jamie Lytle-Webb
When “California Fever” raced through southeastern Ohio in the spring of 1849, a number of residents of Athens County organized a cooperative venture for traveling overland to the mines. Known as the “Buckeye Rovers,” the company began its trip westward in early April. The Buckeye Rovers, along with thousands who traveled the overland route to California, endured numerous hardships and the seemingly constant threat of attacks from hostile Indians.
Literary Collections | Diaries & Journals · American History · 19th century · United States · Ohio and Regional · Western Americana · Gold Rush
Klondike Women
True Tales of the 1897–1898 Gold Rush
By Melanie J. Mayer
Klondike Women is a compelling collection of historical photographs and first-hand accounts of the adventures, challenges, and disappointments of women on the trails to the Klondike gold fields. In the midst of a depression near the turn of the twentieth century, these women dared to act on the American dream.
Gender Studies · History · American History · Western Americana · Women’s Studies
Survival On a Westward Trek, 1858–1859
The John Jones Overlanders
By Dwight L. Smith
When gold was discovered in the Fraser River country of British Columbia in the 1850s, St. Paul, Minnesota became the departure point for the plunge westward, as was St. Louis for the American gold rushes. Minnesotans soon caught the fever. Nine young men set out in July of 1858 for the goldfields of British Columbia.
Biography, Adventurers and Explorers · Literary Collections | Diaries & Journals · 19th century · North America · Western Americana · Gold Rush
People of the Valley
A Novel
By Frank Waters
One of Frank Waters’s most popular novels, People of the Valley takes place high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains where an isolated Spanish-speaking people confront a threatening world of change.
Fiction | Indigenous · Fiction · Literature · Western Americana · Western and Pacific States
The Laughing West
Humorous Western Fiction, Past and Present
By Charles L. Sonnichsen
Without humor, the American West would be a vast territory of arid clichés — stolid cowboys and fearless lawmen, or, in more modern visions, dastardly land developers and fanatical environmentalists — all of them as lifeless as an alkalai flat.
Fiction | Humorous | General · Literature · Western Americana · Western and Pacific States
Newport in the Rockies
The Life and Good Times of Colorado Springs
By Marshall Sprague
In 1871, General William Jackson Palmer, a Civil War cavalry hero, dreamed of a Rocky Mountain resort town where sedate, temperate, wealthy folk could enjoy life in tranquil comfort. From its inception as a tiny resort hamlet, Colorado Springs has grown into the second largest city in the Colorado Rockies, with a projected population by 1990 of 400,000.
Pike’s Peak
A Mining Saga
By Frank Waters
During the fabulous reign of Colorado Silver, innumerable prospectors passed by Pike’s Peak on their way to the silver strikes at Leadville, Aspen, and the boom camps in the Saguache, Sangre de Cristo, and San Juan mountains. Then, in 1890, a carpenter named Winfield Scott Stratton discovered gold along Cripple Creek. By 1900, this six square mile area on the south slope of Pike’s Peak supported 475 mines and led the world in gold production.
Interior Country
Stories of the Modern West
Edited by Alexander Blackburn, Craig Lesley, and Jill Landem
A mile down the road from the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, a woman unearths an ancient shard of pottery bearing the thousands-year-old thumbprint of a Navawi‘i woman. A marriage is thrown into crisis by the husband’s discovery, on a fishing trip, of a girl’s corpse. To impress the prostitute he wants to marry, a man constructs a homemade atomic bomb.
Literature · Fiction · American Literature · Western Americana
The Woman at Otowi Crossing
By Frank Waters
This is the story of Helen Chalmer, a person in tune with her adopted environment and her neighbors in the nearby Indian pueblo and also a friend of the first atomic scientists. The secret evolution of atomic research is a counterpoint to her psychic development.
Fiction | Indigenous · Fiction · Literature · Western Americana · Western and Pacific States
Flight from Fiesta
By Frank Waters
Frank Waters, whose work has spanned half a century, has continually attempted to depict the reconciliation of opposites, to heal the national wounds of polarization.Flight From Fiesta, Waters’ first novel in nearly two decades, is testimony to that aspiration, emerging as a moving and masterfully–told story of two characters who must discover the potential for common ground between their personalities.Set in Santa Fe in the mid–fifties, the story itself is deceptively simple.
The Bassett Women
By Grace McClure
Ann and Josie Bassett were members of Butch Cassidy’s inner circle, ranchers, and cattle rustlers. Based on interviews, written records, newspapers, and archives, The Bassett Women is an indelible portrait and one of the few credible accounts of early settlers on Colorado’s western slope, one of the last strongholds of the Old West.
Biography & Autobiography | Women · Western Americana · American History, West
The vast Colorado River collects water from the highest Rocky Mountain peaks and traverses the widest plateaus, the deepest canyons, and the lowest deserts before emptying into the delta of northern Mexico. This austere land and mighty river resist exploration, settlement, and description. But in the hands of one of the West’s great writers, Frank Waters, the history and lore of its past make irresistible reading and a resounding case for mankind’s respect for the environment.
The Cowboy in American Prints
Edited by John Meigs
The cowboy—that lonely, quiet, hard-working, hard-playing, essentially honest, always masculine, rugged individual—has become the preeminent American myth. The graphics represented in this book are in large part responsible for the popularization and sometimes even the creation of the cowboy myth.
Cricket Sings
A Novel of Pre-Columbian Cahokia
By Kathleen King
For Cricket Sings, Cahokia medicine woman, the omens have been bad. She is old, and so at this year’s Sun Ceremony she will tell her stories, the tales handed down from grandparents to grandchildren since the memory of the People began. The Sun King is dying, unable to perfom the Ceremony which will bring good crops to the fields.
Montana Pay Dirt
Guide to Mining Camps of Treasure State
By Muriel Sibell Wolle
The Little Lion of the Southwest
A Life of Manuel Antonio Chaves
By Marc Simmons
Manuel Antonio Chaves’ life (1818–1889) straddled three eras of New Mexican history. A Spanish frontiersman, his long career was interwoven with almost every major historical event which occurred during his adult life—the Texan-Santa Fe Expedition, the Mexican War, the Civil War, skirmishes with Utes, Navajos, and Apaches.
Biography, Adventurers and Explorers · American History, West · Western Americana
One Thousand and One Most Asked Questions About the American West
With Answers
By Harry E. Chrisman
During his more than 40 years of newspaper and magazine work, Harry Chrisman has been answering questions about the American West — both the standard and the oddball queries, such as “What is the most fantastic bear story you ever heard?”Chrisman first encountered many of these questions in his monthly column “Roundup Time,” which appeared in The West, a national monthly magazine.Concentrating
Cuchama and Sacred Mountains
By Walter Y. Evans-Wentz
·
Edited by Frank Waters and Charles L. Adams
W. Y. Evans–Wentz, great Buddhist scholar and translator of such works as the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation explores the astonishing parallels between the spiritual teaching of America’s native peoples and that of the deeply mystical Hindus and Tibetans.
Bonanza Trail
Ghost Towns & Mining Camps of the West
By Muriel Sibell Wolle
This is the story of the men who sought for gold, from California to the eastern rim of the Rocky Mountains.Wolle writes colorfully of the unbelievable privations the men endured in penetrating the fastnesses of the high Sierra and the Rockies and in crossing the desert wastes of Arizona, Utah and Nevada; of the mines first discovered in New Mexico by Coronado and his men four centuries ago; and the first great rush that hit California in 1849.
Stampede to Timberline
The Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of Colorado
By Muriel Sibell Wolle
This book includes the story of 240 of Colorado’s mining camps, with emphasis on the human side. The men who swarmed to the mountains to find precious metal came in successive waves from the late 1850s on, combing the gulches, scrambling over the passes and climbing the peaks. Their story is full of adventurous chances, lucky strikes, boom conditions, reckless spending, banditry, claim jumping, railroad wars and labor troubles.The
Black Hills Ghost Towns
By Watson Parker and Hugh K. Lambert
The Black Hills have been famous ever since the gold rush days of the 1870s when General George A. Custer’s expedition in the summer of 1874 found and advertised placer gold in the Black Hills valleys and a rush to the Hills began. Indian claimants to the area were placated, defeated or ignored and by 1875 a gold rush that continues to the present was under way.The Homestake Mining Company in the Black Hills is today one of the largest operating gold mines in the world.
Pumpkin Seed Point
Being Within the Hopi
By Frank Waters
Frank Waters lived for three years among the Hopi people of Arizona and was quickly drawn into their culture. Pumpkin Seed Point is a beautifully written personal account of Waters’s inner and outer experiences among the Hopi.
Native American Studies · Memoir · Arizona · Western Americana · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
Midas of the Rockies
Biography of Winfield Scott Stratton, Croesus of Cripple Creek
By Frank Waters
·
Introduction by Marshall Sprague
This reprint makes available again Frank Waters’ dramatic and colorful 1937 biography of Winfield Scott Stratton, the man who struck it rich at the foot of Pike’s Peak and turned Cripple Creek into the greatest gold camp on earth.
Biography & Autobiography | General · Literature · Western Americana
Colorado Gem Trails and Mineral Guide
By Richard M. Pearl
This famous book takes you on an extensive gem and mineral collecting tour of Colorado, revealing the interesting places where nature has stored her treasures.Detailed directions are given for reaching the noted as well as the little-known localities in all sections of this great mineral-producing state. Included are numerous mileage logs never before published, and many sketch maps made especially for this book. A unique system arranges the localities along segments of the main highways.Latest
Guide to the Colorado Ghost Towns and Mining Camps
By Perry Eberhart
“This is not a history book. Rather it is a directory of towns, and compilation of known information about those towns. In undertaking the stud, I was amazed at the amount of legend and contradictory information Colorado history has collected in just one hundred years. Who was it that said: ‘History is the perpetuation of saleable gossip’? (Perhaps, nobody has said it yet. In that case, it’s mine, all mine.)”As
Travel - West · American History, West · Colorado · Western Americana
Golden Treasures of the San Juan
By Temple H. Cornelius and John B. Marshall
Golden Treasures of the San Juan contains fabulous stories of lost mines, bullion, and valuable prospects of one of the most beautiful mountain areas of the United States. Many of the stories are based on the personal adventures of author Cornelius.When the Indian Mountain Lands (the San Juan) were ceded in 1874, the wild region was thrown open to prospectors seeking its gold and silver riches. Many prospects were valuable discoveries, yet were lost and became legendary mines.
History | Expeditions & Discoveries · History | United States | 19th Century · Colorado · Western Americana
The Yogi of Cockroach Court
By Frank Waters
In this novel of the mestizo, or mixed-blood, Frank Waters completes the Southwestern canvas begun in The Man Who Killed the Deer and People of the Valley. Set in a violent Mexican border town, the story centers on Barby, a tormented mestizo, Guadalupe, the mestiza “percentage-girl,” and Tai-Ling, the serene yogi.
Chuck Wagon Cookbook
By Beth McElfresh
·
Introduction by Joseph C. O’Mahoney
No chuck wagon feed is complete without its basic ingredients of beans, beef, hot biscuits, apple pie, and lots of coffee. Beth McElfresh shows you how to host the all–time chuck wagon feed with easy–to–follow recipes.Included are original recipes for boiled apple dumplings, lima beans baked with steak, and general, everyday useful tips, all from the renowned Western cook, Hi Pockets.
Masked Gods
Navaho and Pueblo Ceremonialism
By Frank Waters
Masked Gods is a vast book, a challenging and profoundly original account of the history, legends, and ceremonialism of the Navajo and Pueblo Indians of the Southwest. Following a brief but vivid history of the two tribes through the centuries of conquest, the book turns inward to the meaning of Native American legends and ritual—Navajo songs, Pueblo dances, Zuni kachina ceremonies.
The Man Who Killed the Deer
A Novel of Pueblo Indian Life
By Frank Waters
The story of Martiniano, the man who killed the deer, is a timeless story of Pueblo Indian sin and redemption, and of the conflict between Indian and white laws; written with a poetically charged beauty of style, a purity of conception, and a thorough understanding of Native American values.
Fiction | Indigenous · Fiction · Literature · Western Americana · Western and Pacific States
