Agnes Morley Cleaveland found lasting fame after publishing her memoir, No Life for a Lady, in 1941. Her account of growing up on a cattle ranch in west-central New Mexico captivated readers from coast to coast, and it remains in print to this day. In her book, Cleaveland memorably portrayed herself and other ranchwomen as capable workers and independent thinkers. Her life, however, was not limited to the ranch. In Open Range, Darlis A. Miller expands our understanding of Cleaveland's significance, showing how a young girl who was a fearless risk-taker grew up to be a prolific...
Agnes Morley Cleaveland found lasting fame after publishing her memoir, No Life for a Lady, in 1941. Her account of growing up on a cattle ranc...
Charles Goodnight was a pioneer of the early range cattle industry an opinionated and profane but energetic and well-liked rancher.
Goodnight s story is now re-examined by William T. Hagan in this brief, authoritative account that considers the role of ranching in general and Goodnight in particular in the development of the Texas Panhandle. The first major reassessment of his life in seventy years, "Charles Goodnight: Father of the Texas Panhandle" traces its subject s life from hardscrabble farmer to cattle baron, giving close attention to lesser-known aspects of his last thirty...
Charles Goodnight was a pioneer of the early range cattle industry an opinionated and profane but energetic and well-liked rancher.
Mountain man and fur trader Jedediah Smith casts a heroic shadow. He was the first Anglo-American to travel overland to California via the Southwest, and he roamed through more of the West than anyone else of his era. His adventures quickly became the stuff of legend. Using new information and sifting fact from folklore, Barton H. Barbour now offers a fresh look at this dynamic figure.
Barbour tells how a youthful Smith was influenced by notable men who were his family s neighbors, including a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. When he was twenty-three, hard times leavened with...
Mountain man and fur trader Jedediah Smith casts a heroic shadow. He was the first Anglo-American to travel overland to California via the Southwest, ...
Few who appreciate the visual arts or the American Southwest can behold the masterpieces "Sangre de Cristo Mountains "or "Haystack, Taos Valley, 1927 "or "Bend in the River, 1941 "and come away without a vivid image burned into memory. The creator of these and many other depictions of the Southwest and its people was Ernest L. Blumenschein, cofounder of the famous Taos art colony. This insightful, comprehensive biography examines the character and life experiences that made Blumenschein one of the foremost artists of the twentieth century.
Robert W. Larson and Carole B. Larson begin...
Few who appreciate the visual arts or the American Southwest can behold the masterpieces "Sangre de Cristo Mountains "or "Haystack, Taos Valley, 19...
Bret Harte was the best-known and highest-paid writer in America in the early 1870s, yet his vexed attempts to earn a living by his pen led to the failure of his marriage and, in 1878, his departure for Europe. Gary Scharnhorst's biography of Harte traces the growing commercial appeal of western fiction and drama on both sides of the Atlantic during the Gilded Age, a development in which Harte played a crucial role.
Harte's pioneering use of California local color in such stories as "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" challenged genteel assumptions about western writing and helped open...
Bret Harte was the best-known and highest-paid writer in America in the early 1870s, yet his vexed attempts to earn a living by his pen led to the ...
Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine.
Before Calamity...
Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an advent...
Westerns are rarely only about the West. From the works of James Fenimore Cooper to Gary Cooper, stories set in the American West have served as vehicles for topical commentary. More than any other pioneer of the genre, Owen Wister turned the Western into a form of social and political critique, touching on such issues as race, the environment, women's rights, and immigration. In Owen Wister and the West, a biographical-literary account of Wister's life and writings, Gary Scharnhorst shows how the West shaped Wister's career and ideas, even as he lived and worked in the East.
Westerns are rarely only about the West. From the works of James Fenimore Cooper to Gary Cooper, stories set in the American West have served as vehic...
A steadfast champion of his people during the wars with encroaching Anglo-Americans, the Apache chief Victorio deserves as much attention as his better-known contemporaries Cochise and Geronimo. In presenting the story of this nineteenth-century Warm Springs Apache warrior, Kathleen P. Chamberlain expands our understanding of Victorio's role in the Apache wars and brings him into the center of events.
Although there is little documentation of Victorio's life outside military records, Chamberlain draws on ethnographic sources to surmise his childhood and adolescence and to depict...
A steadfast champion of his people during the wars with encroaching Anglo-Americans, the Apache chief Victorio deserves as much attention as his be...
