The author of Blue Highways and PrairyErth "takes us on a lifetime voyage full of imagery, insight and appreciation." --Cleveland Plain Dealer

In his most ambitious journey ever, William Least Heat-Moon sets off aboard a small boat named Nikawa ("river horse" in Osage) from the Atlantic at New York Harbor in hopes of entering the Pacific near Astoria, Oregon. He and his companion, Pilotis, struggle to cover some 5,000 watery miles, often following in the wakes of our most famous explorers, from Henry Hudson to Lewis and Clark.

En route, the voyagers...

Hailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation's backroads.
William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about "those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi."
His adventures, his discoveries, and his recollections of the extraordinary people he...

Three months on the New York Times bestseller list, PrairyErth is now in paperback. Robert Penn Warren pronounced Heat-Moon's Blue Highways "a masterpiece." Now Heat-Moon has pulled to the side of the road and set off on foot to take readers on an exploration of time and space, landscape and history in the Flint Hills of central Kansas.

Four miles southeast of the village of Matfield Green in Chase County, Kansas--the heart of the Flint Hills--lies the abandoned settlement of Thurman. At the turn of the century Thurman was a prosperous farming and ranching settlement with fifty-one households, a post office, two general stores, a blacksmith shop, five schools, and a church. Today, only the ruins of Thurman remain.

Joseph Hickey uses Thurman to explore the settlement form of social organization, which--along with the village, hamlet, and small town--was a dominant feature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century...

If photography is the art of writing with light, then photographer Dan Dancer has written the story of Kansas. In this beautiful volume, he has assembled a portrait of the state in its many different lights--a sunflower field at dawn, a rural Main Street in the eerie, greenish light of a summer storm, a nighttime prairie fire, and a dusty stretch of prairie in the hot light of midday.

In 105 full-color photographs Dancer moves through the four seasons, capturing first the vast, spare grandeur of prairie and sky, then focusing closer, to illuminate the more intimate pieces of the Kansas...

In 1827 six Osage people four men and two women traveled to Europe escorted by three Americans. Their visit was big news in France, where three short publications about the travelers appeared almost immediately. Virtually lost since the 1830s, all three accounts are gathered, translated, and annotated here for the first time in English. Among the earliest writings devoted to Osage history and culture, these works provide unique insights into Osage life and especially into European perceptions of American Indians.
William Least Heat-Moon s introduction poignantly tells of people leaving...