You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In the first book to focus on relations between Indians and emigrants on the overland trails, Michael L. Tate shows that such encounters were far more often characterized by cooperation than by conflict. Having combed hundreds of unpublished sources and Indian oral traditions, Tate finds Indians and Anglo-Americans continuously trading goods and news with each other, and Indians providing various forms of assistance to overlanders. Tate admits that both sides normally followed their own best interests and ethical standards, which sometimes created distrust. But many acts of kindness by emigrants and by Indians can be attributed to simple human compassion. Not until the mid-1850s did Plains t...
The Oregon Trail is the gripping account of Francis Parkman's journey west across North America in 1846. After crossing the Allegheny Mountains by coach and continuing by boat and wagon to Westport, Missouri, he set out with three companions on a horseback journey that would ultimately take him over two thousand miles. Map.
Of all the U.S. Army posts in the West, none witnessed more history than Fort Laramie, positioned where the northern Great Plains join the Rocky Mountains. From its beginnings as a trading post in 1834 to its abandonment by the army in 1890, it was involved in the buffalo hide trade, overland migrations, Indian wars and treaties, the Utah War, Confederate maneuvering, and the coming of the telegraph and first transcontinental railroad. Douglas C. McChristian has written the first complete history of Fort Laramie, chronicling every critical stage in its existence, including its addition to the National Park System. He draws on an extraordinary array of archival materials–including those at ...
California’s early history was both colorful and turbulent. After Europeans first explored the region in the sixteenth century, it was conquered and colonized by successive waves of adventurers and settlers. In Contest for California, award-winning author Stephen G. Hyslop draws on a wide array of primary sources to weave an elegant narrative of this epic struggle for control of the territory that many saw as a beautiful, sprawling land of promise. In vivid detail, Hyslop traces the story of early California from its founding in 1769 by Spanish colonists to its annexation in 1848 by the United States. He describes the motivations and activities of colonizers and colonized alike. Using eyew...
Présentation de l'éditeur : "Robidoux Chronicles treats with comprehensive documentary detail the factual history of the Robidoux lineage in North America from the first progenitor who arrived in Quebec in about 1665- through the famous six brothers who distinguished themselves as Mountain Men- up until even recent times on reservations in the US. Many members of the Robidoux family were intimately connected to the entire history of the North American fur trade. The six brothers- born in St. Louis before the coming of Lewis & Clark- were important fur-traders during the classical Rendezvous era of the North American fur trade. They became key players in the organization & articulation of t...
Re-examines the life of John Sutter in the context of America's rush for westward expansion in a fully documented account of the Swiss expatriate and would-be empire builder and his times.
Fully illustrated, this unique and fascinating study sheds new light on familiar events. Drawing on anthropology and ethnohistory as well as the 'new military history', this book interprets and compares the way Indians and European Americans waged wars in Canada, Mexico, the USA and Yucatán during the nineteenth century.
Still the least-understood theater of the Civil War, the Southwest Borderlands saw not only Union and Confederate forces clashing but Indians, Hispanos, and Anglos struggling for survival, power, and dominance on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. While other scholars have examined individual battles, Andrew E. Masich is the first to analyze these conflicts as interconnected civil wars. Based on previously overlooked Indian Depredation Claim records and a wealth of other sources, this book is both a close-up history of the Civil War in the region and an examination of the war-making traditions of its diverse peoples. Along the border, Masich argues, the Civil War played out as a collision...
During the early weeks of 1848, as U.S. congressmen debated the territorial status of California, a Swiss immigrant and an itinerant millwright forever altered the future state’s fate. Building a sawmill for Johann August Sutter, James Wilson Marshall struck gold. The rest may be history, but much of the story of what happened in the following year is told not in history books but in the letters, diaries, journals, and other written recollections of those whom the California gold rush drew west. In this second installment in the projected four-part collection The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, the hardy souls who made the arduous trip tell the...
“Texas is not a place, it is a commotion!” exclaimed one early visitor to the state, underscoring the mobility and “get-ahead” spirit that have always characterized Texas and its people. In these thought-provoking essays, Howard R. Lamar looks specifically at the “crossings” that have characterized Texas history to see what effect these migrations to and through Texas have had on Texas, the Southwest, and links between Texas and California. Originally presented in 1986 at the University of Texas at Austin as the first George W. Littlefield Lectures in American History, these essays explore a previously neglected aspect of the western story: the influence of Texans—and other Sou...