A history of three centuries in which a new race engulfed a continent.For twenty years or more, whenever he was able, Bernard DeVoto has been visiting and revisiting the pioneer trails, the Missouri River in particular. He has studied its volume and seasonal flow, its weather and geological history, and has traced its bends on the minutely detailed sectional maps of the United States Geological Survey and the Army Engineers.He has flow its length from St. Louis to its source ...

This book tells many fascinating stories of the U.S. explorers who began the Western march from the Mississippi to the Pacific, from Canada to the annexation of Texas, California, and the Southwest lands from Mexico. It is the penultimate book of a trilogy which includes Across the Wide Missouri, for which DeVoto won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes in 1948, and The Course of Empire, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1953. DeVoto's narrative covers the expanding West...

“Dorothy Parker's stern eye mixed with the sass of Mark Twain, and a jigger of Christopher Hitchens thrown in for good, boozy measure.” —The AtlanticOne part celebration, one part history, two parts manifesto, Bernard DeVoto’s The Hour is a comic and unequivocal treatise on how and why we drink—properly. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author turns his shrewd wit on the spirits and attitudes of his time (warning: this book is NO...

Native Americans make up less than one per cent of the total US population but represent half the nation's languages and cultures. Here, in one grand sweep, is the full story of Native American society, culture and religion. Here is everything from the land-based spirituality of their early creation myths and the late rise of Indian Pride, to the 88 uses to which the Sioux put the flesh and bones of the buffalo and the practice of berdache (men adopted as women).The book offers a c...

William W. Warren's History of the Ojibway People has long been recognized as a classic source on Ojibwe history and culture. Warren, the son of an Ojibwe woman, wrote his history in the hope of saving traditional stories for posterity even as he presented to the American public a sympathetic view of a people he believed were fast disappearing under the onslaught of a corrupt frontier population. He collected firsthand descriptions and stories from relatives, tribal leaders, and acquaintan...

The voyageur's highway was the route from Lake Superior along inland waterways to the Minnesota North Country. Countless people—explorers, fur traders, missionaries, map makers, lumberjacks, miners, naturalists—were drawn to the region's woods and lakeshores. Indians, French Canadians,Scandinavians, and Slavs all used the rich resources of the land to follow an old way of life or to find a new one. In a lively, clear style, Grace Lee Nute tells the fascinating story of their adventures and...

The desire to preserve to future ages the memory of past achievements is a universal human instinct, as witness the clay tablets of old Chaldea, the hieroglyphs of the obelisks, our countless thousands of manuscripts and printed volumes, and the gossiping old story-teller of the village or the backwoods cabin. The reliability of the record depends chiefly on the truthfulness of the recorder and the adequacy of the method employed. In Asia, the cradle of civilization, authentic history goes...

The myths given in this book are part of a large body of material collected among the Cherokee, chiefly in successive field seasons from 1887 to 1890, inclusive, and comprising more or less extensive notes, together with original Cherokee manuscripts, relating to the history, archeology, geographic nomenclature, personal names, botany, medicine, arts, home life, religion, songs, ceremonies, and language of the tribe. Contents: Historical Sketch of the Cherokee Stories and Story-tellers The...

Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest recovers the agrarian village world Indian women created in the lush lands of the Ohio Valley. Algonquian-speaking Indians living in a crescent of towns along the Wabash tributary of the Ohio were able to evade and survive the Iroquois onslaught of the seventeenth century, to absorb French traders and Indigenous refugees, to export peltry, and to harvest riparian, wetland, and terrestrial resources of every description and breathtaking r...

In 1906 when the Creek Indian Chitto Harjo was protesting the United States government's liquidation of his tribe's lands, he began his argument with an account of Indian history from the time of Columbus, "for, of course, a thing has to have a root before it can grow." Yet even today most intelligent non-Indian Americans have little knowledge of Indian history and affairs those lessons have not taken root.This book is an in-depth historical survey of the Indians of the United Stat...

Covering more than two centuries, The Beaver Men recounts the beginning of the beaver trade along the St. Lawrence to the last great rendezvous of traders and trappers on Ham’s Fork, in what is now Wyoming, in 1834. The Beaver Men is the third in Mari Sandoz’s trilogy of books narrating the history of the American West in relation to an animal species.

The native tribes collectively known as the Abenaki once thrived along the Granite State's great rivers.Comprised of the Penacook, Winnipesaukee, Pigwacket, Sokoki, Cowasuck, and Ossipee tribes, influences of these "men of the east" abound even today, from the boiling of sap for maple syrup to the game of lacrosse, and even traditional corn-and-bean succotash. Historian Bruce Heald has mined, curated, and saved the real story of this land's first people. Learn unwr...