In the two decades between the Second World War and the Great Alaska Earthquake, Anchorage grew by a factor of 10. Money was, quite literally, washing down the street. The economic boom was so great that all you needed to make a million dollars was a cash register. At the same time Anchorage was one of the few cities in America where organized crime never got a firm foothold. Uptown, downtown, out of town, the locals were clever enough to keep the East Coast families out. Walrus With A Gol...

The diaries and letters of women who braved the overland trails during the great nineteenth-century westward migration are treasured documents in the study of the American West. These eight firsthand accounts are among the best ever written. They were selected for the power with which they portray the hardship, adventure, and boundless love for friends and family that characterized the overland experience. Some were written with the skilled pens of educated women. Others bear the marks of ...

"There is an old saw in the army which teaches that you can never know a man until after having made a scout with him in bad weather. All the good qualities and bad in the human make up force their way to the surface under the stimulus of privation and danger, and it not infrequently happens that the comrade who at the military post was most popular, by reason of charm of manner and geniality, returns from this trial sadly lowered in the estimation of his fellows, and that he who in the ga...

In "Indian Depredations in Texas," John Wesley Wilbarger crafts a meticulous historical narrative that chronicles the tumultuous encounters between Native American tribes and early Texan settlers during the 19th century. Employing a detailed documentary style, Wilbarger incorporates firsthand accounts, personal experiences, and a rich array of primary sources to provide readers with an immersive exploration of this often-overlooked aspect of American history. The book situates itself withi...

When the railroad stretched its steel rails across the American West in the 1870s, it opened up a vast expanse of territory with very few people but enormous agricultural potential: a second Western frontier, the garden West. Agriculture quickly followed the railroads, making way for Kansas wheat and Colorado sugar beets and Washington apples. With this new agriculture came an unavoidable need for harvest workers—for hands to pick the apples, cotton, oranges, and hops; to pull and top the ...

A memoir of youthful years spent in Colorado as the American West was transformed, by the author of High, Wide, and Lonesome and The Dog Who Came to Stay.Country Editor's Boy picks up where Hal Borland's classic memoir High, Wide and Lonesome left off: with Borland, on the cusp of adulthood in the early twentieth century, making his way in an eastern Colorado town that still retained all the flavors of the Old West. Borland's fat...

Roman Catholic sisters first traveled to the American West as providers of social services, education, and medical assistance. In Across God's Frontiers, Anne M. Butler traces the ways in which sisters challenged and reconfigured contemporary ideas about women, work, religion, and the West; moreover, she demonstrates how religious life became a vehicle for increasing women's agency and power.Moving to the West introduced significant changes for these women, including public...

Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday—such are the legendary names that spring to mind when we think of the western gunfighter. But in the American West of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thousands of grassroots gunfighters straddled both sides of the law without hesitation. Deadly Dozen tells the story of twelve infamous gunfighters, feared in their own times but almost forgotten today.Now, noted historian Robert K. DeArment has compiled the stories o...

For generations, the Native American people have been a society of great mystery. The Assiniboine and Sioux Indians of the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern Montana are no exception. Althoughcenturies old, their culture is only now being rediscovered and explored. The idea to reveal some of their fascinating story stemmed from the desire,devotion, and dedication of a few individuals to embrace the opportunity to explore this wondrous race of people. In 1851 at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, th...

The second-largest Latino-immigrant group in Los Angeles after Mexicans, Central Americans have become a remarkable presence in city neighborhoods, with colorful festivals, flags adorning cars, community organizations, as well as vibrant ethnic businesses. The people from Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama living in Los Angeles share many cultural and historical commonalities, such as language, politics, religion, and perilous migratory paths as wel...

An astonishing untold story from the nineteenth century—a “riveting…engrossing…‘American Epic’” (The Wall Street Journal) and necessary work of history that reads like Gone with the Wind for the Cherokee.“A vigorous, well-written book that distills a complex history to a clash between two men without oversimplifying” (Kirkus Reviews), Blood Moon is the story of the feud between two rival Cherokee chiefs from the early years of th...

Foreword by Richard Dillon. Between 1842 and 1853, John C. Fremont led five expeditions across the trans-Mississippi West. While the success of his early journeys gained him acclaim as a national hero, his later missions ended in tragedy and ultimately a court-martial. Historian Ferol Egan focuses on Fremont’s explorations, providing a vivid portrait of a courageous man in an emerging young nation.