Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Historical

The colorful figures of the western American frontier, the Indian fighters, the mountain men, the outlaws, and the lawmen, have been romanticized for more than a hundred years by writers who found it easier to invent history than the research it. "Bat" Masterson was one such character who cast a long shadow across the pages of western history as it has been routinely depicted.

"A legend in his own time," he was called in a television series produced in the 1960's. A legend he has becomeone firmly fixed in the popular imagination. But in his own time W.B. Masterson was a man, a...

This book chronicles the life and frontier career of Don Juan de Onate, the first colonizer of the old Spanish Borderlands. Born in Zacatecas, Mexico, in the mid-sixteenth century, Don Juan was the prominent son of an aristocratic silver-mining family.

In 1598, in his late forties, Onate led a formidable expedition of settlers, with wagons and livestock, on an epic march northward to the upper Rio Grade Valley of New Mexico. There he established the first European settlement west of the Mississippi, launching a significant chapter in early American history.

In his activities...

Of all the memoirs of the wild West, Frank Crampton's autobiography of his youth in the mining camps ranks with the very best.

Scion of a wealthy New York family, Crampton ran away from home in 1904 at the age of sixteen. Two bindle stiffs picked him up in a Chicago railroad depot and led him west as they taught him to survive first as a hobo and then as a hard-rock miner. In the first two decades of this century Crampton lived and worked in almost all of the important mining camps in the Westin California, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado as a miner, assayer, surveyor, and finally one of...

Narcissa Whitman and her husband, Marcus, were pioneer missionaries to the Cayuse Indians in Oregon Territory. Narcissa grew up in western New York State, her values and attitudes carefully shaped by her mother. Very much a child of the Second Great Awakening, she eagerly embraced the burgeoning evangelical missionary movement. Following her marriage to Marcus Whitman, she spent most of 1836 traveling overland with him to Oregon. Narcissa enthusiastically began service as a missionary there, hoping to see many "benighted" Indians adopt her message of salvation through Christ.

But...

Horses, friends, ragtime music, and steer roping-those were the interests of the youthful Will Rogers as he came of age in the Indian Territory and traveled to the Southern Hemisphere in this first of six definitive volumes of "The Papers of Will Rogers."

By separating fact from legend and unveiling new knowledge via extensive archival research, this documentary history represents a unique contribution to Rogers scholarship and to studies of the Cherokee Nation West. Using many previously unpublished letters and photographs-together with introductions, notes, and biographies of his...

Clad in the black robe of his priestly order and armed only with a crucifix, for more than a quarter of a century Father De Smet relentlessly tramped the American frontier to bring peace and religion to the tribes of the Pacific Northwest and the upper Missouri River country.

In this biography, Robert Carriker describes De Smet's love for the great American West and the native tribes who lived there, the Potawatomis, Flatheads, Coeur d'Alenes, Kalispels, Blackfeet, Yankton Sioux, and others to whom the Jesuit father carried Christianity. Soon the man called Black Robe became known...

This is a lively effort to pierce the thick fog of Falsehood, calumny, ignorance, and legend surrounding the four years Sam Houston spent among the Cherokees in what is now northeastern Oklahoma, the broken years in Tennessee, and his advent in Texas on the eve of the War for Independence."-Virginia Quarterly Review"

Now, for the first time, Robert K. DeArment has told the full story of George Scarborough s life, illuminating his activity as a lawman during the final part of the nineteenth century and his controversial killings while wearing the badge-he was tried for murder on three occasions and acquitted each time."

Here for the first time is the complete life story of the controversial lawman Frank Canton, born Joe Horner, who, after conviction and imprisonment for armed robbery, escaped to change his name and transform himself into an ambitious, hard-working peace officer pursuing felons all over the western frontier for almost half a century.

Canton was active in widely separate sections of the country--Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Alaska--during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth. Western historian Robert K. DeArment has tracked down the facts of...

Sam Bass is perhaps the most notorious Texas outlaw of the 1870s. Within four years he and his band robbed trains, stages, and stores from the Dakota Territory to the Mexican border. He was not a killer, and because the railroads and their high freight rates were unpopular, Bass quickly became a legendary hero. Nevertheless, Wells Fargo agents, railroad detectives, Texas Rangers, and posses of private citizens chased Bass from his hideout in Denton County, Texas, throughout the old Southwest until he was shot by Texas Rangers in an attempted bank robbery at Round Rock, Texas, in 1878.

Seeking the Northwest Passage and the fabled like to Russia, Japan, and Cathay, Alexander Mackenzie drove himself and his men relentlessly, by canoe and portage, across the uncharted rivers, valleys, and mountains of North America. Mackenzie's 1789 journey to the Arctic Ocean and his arduous journey to the Pacific in 1793 predate the Lewis and Clark expedition. By the age of thirty-one Alexander Mackenzie had become the first man to cross North America from the northwestern hub of the interior trade, Lake Athabasca in present-day northern Alberta, to the Pacific Ocean. He had opened the...

"I went into lots of fights by myself, and I came out by myself, too " said Captain Manuel T. "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas of the Texas Rangers. In this lively biography, Brownson Malsch describes Gonzaullas's career, first as a major in the Mexican Army and then as an agent of the U.S. Treasury Department, before he joined the Rangers in 1920.

Although trained as an "old-style" Texas Ranger, Gonzaullas was an early advocate of scientific crime-detection methods and was instrumental in setting up the state's first modern crime-detection facility. His many cases included the Santa...

"Unlikely Warriors" is the story of Benjamin Henry Grierson, Civil War hero and postwar commander of the Tenth Cavalry "Buffalo Soldiers," and his family on the western frontier. In 1863, Colonel Grierson led a cavalry brigade of 1,700 men on a daring raid through Mississippi, which helped Ulysses S. Grant launch his successful campaign against Vicksburg. In the army reorganization of 1866, Grierson accepted an appointment as colonel of the Tenth Cavalry, a command of white officers and black enlisted men. In this biography, William and Shirley Leckie explore three generations of Grierson...

James Kirker, "Indian fighter," is among the most infamous characters of the American West. In his exhaustively researched biography, Ralph Adam Smith explores the controversy surrounding the life of this frontier figure. Kirker emigrated from Ireland to New York City in 1810. In the years that followed, he was a privateer (in the War of 1812), a British captive, a merchant, a mountain man, the head of a private army, and a dominant figure in New Mexico politics.

When Apache and Comanche Indians from the United States began raiding frequently in northern Mexico, the Mexican government,...