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Sondra Jones traces the metamorphosis of the Ute people from a society of small, interrelated bands of mobile hunter-gatherers to sovereign, dependent nations--modern tribes who run extensive business enterprises and government services. Weaving together the history of all Ute groups--in Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico--the narrative describes their traditional culture, including the many facets that have continued to define them as a people. Jones emphasizes how the Utes adapted over four centuries and details events, conflicts, trade, and social interactions with non-Utes and non-Indians. Being and Becoming Ute examines the effects of boarding--and public--school education; colonial wars an...
On July 22, 1847, a group of about forty refugees entered the Salt Lake Valley. Among them were three enslaved men, two of whom shared the religion, Mormonism, that had caused them to flee. The valley was also home to members of the Ute tribe, who would sometimes barter captive women and children to Spanish colonizers. Thus, the question of whether the Latter-day Saints would accept or reject slavery in their new Zion confronted them on the day they first arrived. Five years later, after Utah had become an American territory, its legislature was prodded to take up the question then roiling the nation: would they be slave or free? George D. Watt, the official reporter for the 1852 legislative...
2023 Big Other Book Award Nonfiction Finalist Populism has become a global movement associated with nationalism and strong-man politicians, but its root causes remain elusive. Mud, Blood, and Ghosts exposes one deep root in the soil of the American Great Plains. Julie Carr traces her own family's history through archival documents to draw connections between U.S. agrarian populism, spiritualism, and eugenics, helping readers to understand populism's tendency toward racism and exclusion. Carr follows the story of her great-grandfather Omer Madison Kem, three-term Populist representative from Nebraska, avid spiritualist, and committed eugenicist, to explore persistent themes in U.S. history: p...
In this fascinating, epic biography, award-winning historian Stephen G. Yanoff vividly narrates the adventurous life-journey of John Charles Frémont, the most celebrated American explorer and mapper of his time. This is history on a grand scale -- a book about discovery and exploration, but also about human character, virtue, ambition, love, and sacrifice. Above all, WONDER OF THE WEST is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most courageous and important Americans of the 19th century -- an illegitimate child who rose to become “The Conqueror of California,” Civil War general, two-time Republican presidential candidate, pathfinder of the West, and husband to the extraordinary Jessie Benton Frémont. “WONDER OF THE WEST is a lucid and compelling biography... John C. Frémont's life is one every American should know well, and it has not been told better than by Mr. Yanoff.” - Renegade Reviews
An incisive history of early American archaeology—from reckless looting to professional science—and the field’s unfinished efforts to make amends today, told "with passion, indignation, and a dash of suspense" (New York Times). American archaeology was forever scarred by an 1893 business proposition between cowboy-turned-excavator Richard Wetherill and socialites-turned-antiquarians Fred and Talbot Hyde. Wetherill had stumbled upon Mesa Verde’s spectacular cliff dwellings and started selling artifacts, but with the Hydes’ money behind him, well—there’s no telling what they might discover. Thus begins the Hyde Exploring Expedition, a nine-year venture into Utah’s Grand Gulch a...
William Lewis Manly was a forty-niner, explorer, and humanitarian whose story most people have never heard. Born in Vermont, William Lewis Manly was drawn out west by the lure of gold. Previous scholarship claims that the Yankee frontiersman floated only 290 miles down the Green River to the Uinta Basin, but author Michael D. Kane’s research of primary source materials led him to the conclusion that Manly actually traveled 415 miles, all the way to what is now Green River, Utah. This would make Manly the first to explore much of the Green River by boat—twenty years before John Wesley Powell’s famous expedition. Determined to prove his theory and establish Manly’s legacy as a trailblazer, Kane conducted research and then built his own wooden canoes and made the trip, tracing Manly’s footsteps and comparing notes with the earlier traveler. Country Never Trod follows Manly’s little-known expedition down the Green River and his overland trek through some of the most desolate stretches of Utah, interspersed with Kane’s journal entries and photographs documenting his own trip.
These distinctive animal and human tales offer a rich source of Ute culture for anyone interested in the peoples of the Great Basin. The 102 stories are ribald, sometimes violent, yet delicately balanced and full of humor. In addition to Smith's transcriptions from Ute storytellers, Ute Tales contains photographs made in 1909 by Edward Sapir and in 1936 by Alden Hayes.
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