Enamored by the western frontier, British immigrant Cashup Davis, his wife Mary Ann, and nine children became one of the first white families to settle on the Palouse’s spectacular rolling hills in eastern Washington Territory. Living at first in a simple sod house, they turn their bunchgrass acreage into a farm, befriend Native Americans during a war ignited by the U.S. government’s treaty violations, and eventually open an immensely popular and prosperous stagecoach stop. But Cashup has ...

The stories of the men and women who dug for gold on Williams Creek are told in this revised and updated edition of a Canadian bestseller.The legendary town of Barkerville is flourishing today, just as it did more than 150 years ago, but this time under the care of professional and amateur historians. Richard Thomas Wright peels back the pages of history as he unearths the area’s history and chronicles the fortunes and the follies of gold-rush-era Barkerville. The result of years o...

The #1 New York Times–bestselling coauthor of American Sniper details the history of the nineteenth-century express mail service that spanned the American west.On the eve of the Civil War, three American businessmen launched an audacious plan to create a financial empire by transforming communications across the hostile territory between the nation's two coasts. In the process, they created one of the most enduring icons of the American West: the P...

An indispensable guide to the historical expeditionary adventure across the American continent.Preface by #1 New York Times –bestselling author Stephen E. AmbroseMore than two centuries have passed since Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's famous transcontinental journey between the Missouri and the Columbia River systems. They never did find the fabled Northwest Passage, but over twenty-eight mo...

Overnight settlements, better known as "Hell on Wheels," sprang up as the transcontinental railroad crossed Nebraska and Wyoming. They brought opportunity not only for legitimate business but also for gamblers, land speculators, prostitutes, and thugs. Dick Kreck tells their stories along with the heroic individuals who managed, finally, to create permanent towns in the interior West.

The epic story of the buffalo in America, from prehistoric times to today—a moving and beautifully illustrated work of natural history inspired by the PBS series "American Buffalo"The American buffalo—our nation’s official mammal—is an improbable, shaggy beast that has found itself at the center of many of our most mythic and sometimes heartbreaking tales. The largest land animals in the Western Hemisphere, they are survivors of a mass extinction that erased ancien...

How did cattle drives come about—and why did the cowboy become an iconic American hero?Cattle drives were the largest, longest, and ultimately the last of the great forced animal migrations in human history. Spilling out of Texas, they spread longhorns, cowboys, and the culture that roped the two together throughout the American West. In cities like Abilene, Dodge City, and Wichita, buyers paid off ranchers, ranchers paid off wranglers, and railroad lines took the ...

This edition in the American Trails Revisited series explores the Oregon Trail through Wyoming. The route of the southern Cherokee Trail route along U.S. Highway 30, the main Oregon-California-Mormon Emigrant Road entering the state on U.S. Highway 26, as well as the side routes of the California-Mormon Trail through Fort Bridger and the Lander Cut-Off through the Thompson Pass, are explored in this guide. Over 300 historic sites and points of interest are documented, with detailed driving...

"Really!? A railroad through the bottom of the Grand Canyon?" Crazy idea, right? But in fact, it came closer to happening than most people realize.This is the little-known story of how hubris killed the railroad's president and saved the world's most beloved canyon. Frank Mason Brown drowned in a whirlpool in the Grand Canyon because he was sure he could build a great railroad through its depths and become rich and famous. He believed he could define reality. Although he died 127 y...

Probing the Journals of Lewis and Clark far more closely than other works, the book develops the understanding that these Enlightenment gentlemen from Virginia gradually entered the unfamiliar world of the West and Native American animism and magic, and they responded differently. Clark adapted and learned from the Indians, whereas Lewis resisted them as "savages." Clark returned after having envisioned a "landscape of hope" and lives a long life of service to native tribes. Lewis saw a "l...

"Conjures the Adirondack wilderness as a vast and imposing stage on which a succession of human dramas—from the romantic to the terrifying—come alive." —John Berendt, #1 New York Times -bestselling authorA New York Times Notable BookHis book is a romance, a story of first love between Americans and a thing they call "wilderness." For it was in the Adiro...

The 1859 "gold fever" emboldened many adventurous souls to head west to the mineral-rich regions of the Kansas and Nebraska territories. Their destination, commonly called "Pike's Peak," was the area known today as Colorado's Front Range. The prospector's dream was of an easy life of wealth and the never-ending happiness that gold could buy. As you read the chapters in Rush to the Rockies!, imagine yourself 150 years ago, provisioning for a long wagon trip across the plains, prodding your ...