Kategoria BISAC: Travel >> United States - West - General

Winner of the Mountains and Plains Book Seller's Association Award

"Sprawling in scope. . . . Mr. Egan uses the past powerfully to explain and give dimension to the present." --The New York Times

"Fine reportage . . . honed and polished until it reads more like literature than journalism." --Los Angeles Times

"They have tried to tame it, shave it, fence it, cut it, dam it, drain it, nuke it, poison it, pave it, and subdivide it," writes Timothy Egan of the West; still, "this region's hold on the American character...

Although tourism has been a blessing for many, bringing economic and cultural prosperity to communities without obvious means of support or allowing towns on the brink of extinction to renew themselves; the costs on more intangible levels may...

Although tourism has been a blessing for many, bringing economic and cultural prosperity to communities without obvious means of support or allowing towns on the brink of extinction to renew themselves; the costs on more intangible levels may...

Between 1861 and 1865 the violent struggles of the Civil War extended into the Western Territories, where they were complicated by the involvement of the Indians. The Confederate leaders had planned to annex a corridor from the Rio Grande in Texas to the California coast. Thus they would have had a pathway to the Pacific Ocean, areas rich in minerals, new territory for the expansion of slavery, and valuable military stores and equipment. They soon found that the land was more difficult to conquer than they had anticipated. The people of the Western Territories for the most part remained...

In summer 1883, General William Tecumseh Sherman took Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, his former aide-de-camp, with him on a 10,000-mile inspection tour across the northern tier of territories, on to the Pacific Northwest, south through California, and east through the Southwest to Denver. Dodge had no idea his journals would ever become public, so he wrote openly about his companions and their interactions, terrain and natural wonders, conditions of military posts, life in civilian communities, and what the future seemed to hold for the region and its changing population.

Roughly a quarter of a million acres of land spanning much of Utah and most of Nevada, the Great Basin is the highest and driest of the American deserts, a vast empty tract on the nineteenth-century maps of our continent. Explorers and cartographers found it imponderable; pioneers and settlers found it uninhabitable. And today the Great Basin remains a largely unknown and forbidding landscape, one that...