In today's world of jet airplanes and smooth highways, it is nearly impossible to imagine the hardships faced by the thousands of people who headed west along the great Oregon Trail. In this detailed and engaging account, historian David Dary recounts the full saga of the trail's history, from its creation in the early 1800's, to its peak during the '49 Gold Rush, its rapid decline following the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and finally, its revival as a modern day historical treasure. Dary introduces us to the pioneers: trailblazers, fur-traders, and missionaries, who...
In today's world of jet airplanes and smooth highways, it is nearly impossible to imagine the hardships faced by the thousands of people who headed we...
"Authentic history, delightfully told" is the way Ray A. Billington, renowned historian of the Old West, described this collection. David Dary, award-winning chronicler of life on the frontier plains, is at his entertaining best in these thirty-nine episodes, sagas, and tales from Kansas's vigorous, free-spirited past. Many of the stories appeared in Dary's True Tales of the Old-Time Plains, but that book, out of print for several years, focused on the Great Plains in general. This new edition, revised and with additional stories and a new title, pulls together tales about people, animals and...
"Authentic history, delightfully told" is the way Ray A. Billington, renowned historian of the Old West, described this collection. David Dary, award-...
"Rollicking, adventurous, touching" is how American West magazine described David Dary's first collection of stories, True Tales of Old-Time Kansas. This sequel, containing forty-one episodes, sagas, and legends from Kansas's vigorous, free-spirited past, shows Dary again at his entertaining best. More True Tales is filled with engaging stories of outlaws and lawmen, trailride adventures, buried treasures, natural catastrophes, the famous and the obscure. Sometimes romantic and always colorful, these stories touch on the struggles and hardships encountered by the pioneers as they...
"Rollicking, adventurous, touching" is how American West magazine described David Dary's first collection of stories, True Tales of Old-Time Kansas...
A nationwide bestseller--with more than 65,000 copies in print since publication by Alfred A. Knopf in 1981, this fascinating chronicle of cowboy life and legend is now available in a trade paperback edition. It's the 500-year saga of the "real cowboy"--from fifteenth-century Mexico to the twentieth-century American West.
A nationwide bestseller--with more than 65,000 copies in print since publication by Alfred A. Knopf in 1981, this fascinating chronicle of cowboy life...
"A fascinating array of information on everything from how to prepare a buffalo robe to what one could expect to find in a small trading post on the south Platte River in the 1830s. Portrays the coming together of a great nation". -- Philadelphia Inquirer.
"The scope of this book is as wide as the region itself and thorough as a wagon master's supply list". -- Denver Post.
"A fascinating array of information on everything from how to prepare a buffalo robe to what one could expect to find in a small trading post on the s...
"Pioneering Americans of the nineteenth century did not merely rush for gold, lust for land, and thrust aside the West's original inhabitants. These mountain men, cowboys, homesteaders, and cavalry troopers played nearly as hard as they worked, exploiting to the hilt what little leisure they could steal from their labors. Nor did they only carouse-drink, gamble, and womanize-as the West's fiction might suggest. They were spectators at bull and bear fights in California; actors in amateur theatricals in Army garrisons; and participants in communal barn raisings and quilting bees on the...
"Pioneering Americans of the nineteenth century did not merely rush for gold, lust for land, and thrust aside the West's original inhabitants. These m...
In Red Blood and Black Ink, bestselling author David Dary chronicles the long, exciting, often surprising story of journalism in the Old West-from the freewheeling days of the early 1800s to the classic small-town weeklies and busy city newsrooms of the 1920s. Here are the printers who founded the first papers, arriving in town with a shirttail of type and a secondhand press, setting up shop under trees, in tents, in barns or storefronts, moving on when the town failed, or into larger quarters if it flourished, and sometimes forced to defend their right of free speech with fists or...
In Red Blood and Black Ink, bestselling author David Dary chronicles the long, exciting, often surprising story of journalism in the Old West-f...
Ever wonder why cowboys sing? Or where Henry Starr's treasure is buried? Or what legend lies behind the origin of the word "rawhide"? The prairies and plains are bursting with stories, a region whose flat openness belies a colorful history that's now captured in this cornucopia of colorful tales. David Dary is a master storyteller and award-winning historian who was born in the region and still calls it home. In this book, he shares forty forgotten tales that capture the history, romance, and lore of early life on the plains and prairie--rollicking adventures set between the Rio Grande...
Ever wonder why cowboys sing? Or where Henry Starr's treasure is buried? Or what legend lies behind the origin of the word "rawhide"? The prairies and...
The journals and memoirs of 19th century explorers and travelers in the American West often told of viewing buffalo massed together as far as the eye could see. This book appropriately covers the subject of the buffalo as extensively as that animal covered the plains. Other recent accounts of the buffalo have focused on two or three aspects, emphasizing its natural history, the hunters and the hunted in prehistoric time, the relationship between the buffalo and the American Indian. David Dary's treatment stretches from horizon to horizon. Of course he discusses the origin of the buffalo in...
The journals and memoirs of 19th century explorers and travelers in the American West often told of viewing buffalo massed together as far as the eye ...
In the development of the American West, no two decades were so full of romance and change as the years from the California gold rush of 1849 to the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869. In two decades, the West was conquered and the secession movement rose and fell. From slow ox-team and prairie schooner to the dashing Pony Express, the overland mail service mirrored these monumental strides.
Originally published in 1926, "The Overland Mail" was the first scholarly work to examine the impact of the postal service on the expansion of the West as the service evolved...
In the development of the American West, no two decades were so full of romance and change as the years from the California gold rush of 1849 to th...
