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
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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
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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
Chuck Wagon Cookbook
By Beth McElfresh
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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.
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.
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
