Glacier National Park and the Great Northern Railway became synonymous in the early 20th century. Original photographs, posters, menus, postcards, and other rare materials support this fascinating pictorial history of the creation and promotion of the park by Great Northern as railroad barons raced west and competed for precious territory to expand their empires.
This is the definitive guide to North American train travel, complete with booking procedures, on-board etiquette, maps, floor plans for typical coach and sleeping cars, and more. This new edition reflects all the recent changes at Amtrak, North America's largest passenger rail system.
Bristol takes readers on a journey through the history of Glacier National Park, beginning over a billion years ago from the formation of the Belt Sea, to the present day climate-changing extinction of the very glaciers that sculpted most of the wonders of its landscapes. He delves into the ways in which this area of Montana seemed to have been preparing itself for the coming of humankind through a series of landmass adjustments like the Lewis Overthrust and the ice ages that came and went. First there were tribes of Native Americans whose deep regard for nature left the landscape intact. They were followed by Euro-American explorers and settlers who may have been awed by the new lands, but began to move wildlife to near extinction. Fortunately for the area that would become Glacier, some began to recognize that laying siege to nature and its bounties would lead to wastelands. Bristol recounts how a renewed conservation ethic fostered by such leaders as Emerson, Thoreau, Olmstead, Muir, and Teddy Roosevelt took hold. Their disciples were Grinnell, Hill, Mather, Albright, and Franklin Roosevelt, and they would not only take up the call but rally for the cause. These giants would create and preserve a park landscape to accommodate visitors and wilderness alike.
“Orphans preferred” was the call that went out to the daring of heart when the Pony Express was organized nearly 150 years ago in April 1860. Called “The Greatest Enterprise of Modern Times,” the endeavor—which lasted only nineteenth months—recruited young men willing to risk life and limb in a relay race that crossed the frontier on a route from St. Joseph, Missouri, to San Francisco, California, speeding the delivery of mail to an astonishing ten days. The Pony Express combines the legends and lore of this remarkable mail service with contemporary photography and archival images and documents from the past, and celebrates the sesquicentennial of the start—and end—of those daring rides, which ended with the completion of the transcontinental railroad. It is a befitting tribute to an American icon whose legacy is marked to this day by Pony Express museums all along the route from Missouri to California.
The "masterfully chilling" novel that inspired the hit AMC series (Entertainment Weekly). The men on board the HMS Terror — part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage — are entering a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, they struggle to survive with poisonous rations, a dwindling coal supply, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is even more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror clawing to get in. “The best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years.” —Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe
A special breed of adventurer, the first forest rangers were among the explorers, mountain men, lawmen, and pioneers who made America. First Rangers details the exploits of two of these men, told mostly in their own words. Written in the saddle while riding along the trail, or on a log at camp, or at a table in a dimly lit cabin, these stories bring to life a bygone era. “Their stories, to paraphrase Don Bunger, Liebig’s neighbor and friend, will never happen again to anyone, for the conditions are not here anymore to produce them,“ writes author C. W. Guthrie. Part journal written by the men themselves and part carefully researched biography illustrated by fascinating historic photos and documents, First Rangers celebrates two men who were, as Guthrie puts it, “. . . heroes of their era. Liebig as the first forest ranger in what became Glacier National Park built the first ranger station, patrolled over a half-million acres, led numerous wildfire fights and saved at least three lives that we know about. Herrig, who met Theodore Roosevelt while working as a horse wrangler in Medora, North Dakota and later on at Roosevelt’s ranch in the Badlands, joined the Rough Riders and was with Roosevelt in the 1898 Battle of San Juan Hill—the decisive battle of the Spanish-American War.” Frank Liebig and Fred Herrig’s job was to stop wildfires, timber thieves, squatters, and poachers. Supremely suited to their work, Frank and Fred were skilled woodsmen, natural leaders, and men of rare courage and integrity who entered their careers at a time when “. . .becoming a forest ranger was simply to be handed a badge, a rifle, some ammunition, a crosscut saw, and paper to write reports on as your told, ‘Go to it and good luck!’” According to Guthrie, the book is about more than the heroics and adventures of these brave and forthright men. “It is also a love story of several kinds. It is, of course, about Liebig and Herrig’s love of their adopted country, of a good challenge, of the wilderness, and of the Forest Service they served. But ultimately, it portrays their love of the women they chose to share their lives in this wild place and the love of the children to whom they passed on their hard-won knowledge of and abiding affection for the wilds of Glacier country.” Their legacy lives on in their families, in the park's protected wild lands, and in the ethos of today's forest and park rangers.
Between 1955 and 1987, the United States Coast Guard Cutter Glacier was the largest and most powerful icebreaker in the free world. Consequently, it was often given the most difficult and dangerous Antarctic missions. This is the dramatic first-person account of its most legendary voyage. In 1970, the author was the Chief Medical Officer on the Glacier when it became trapped deep in the Weddell Sea, pressured by 100 miles of wind-blown icepack. Glacier was beset within seventy miles of where Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, was imprisoned in 1915. His stout wooden ship succumbed to the crushing pressure of the infamous Weddell Sea pack ice and sank, leading to an unbelievable two-year saga of hardship, heroism and survival. The sailors aboard the Glacier feared they would suffer Shackleton’s fate, or one even worse. Freakishly good luck eventually saved the Glacier from destruction in the crushing ice pack, only to experience a three-hour fire that nearly killed one of the crew, followed by eighty foot waves that came close to capsizing the ship. Wind, Fire, and Ice is a story about a physician who starts out with a set of false assumptions—namely that he is going have an easy assignment and see numerous exotic ports, but then slowly comes to realize a much different hard reality.
Austrian toponymist Bernhardt Fingerberg makes his way back to civilization following a solo expedition out on Vatnajokull Glacier, barely alive. While recuperating, Dr. Lassi digs into the scholar's strange trek into the treacherous mountainous wasteland of Iceland: Öræfi. Was he really researching place names out there, or retracing the footsteps of a 20-year-old crime involving someone very close to him?
