Stretching from "Aaron, Sam, Arizona pioneer" to "Zutacapan, Acomo pueblo chief," the three-volume Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography, and Supplemental-volume 4, profiles approximately 4,500 frontier pioneers and Native Americans. Dan L. Thrapp's comprehensive work will interest scholars, researchers, and general readers curious about the figures who developed, defended, decorated, and devilized the American West. All the famous ones are here: Volume I (A-F) includes Billy the Kid, Daniel Boone, Calamity Jane, George Custer, Buffalo Bill, Cochise, and John C. Fremont, among others. There are also entries for worthies less well known: Big Nose Kate, Nellie Cashman, Scott Cooley, to cite a few. Even Gary Cooper and other actors who portrayed westerners are sketched in. Thrapp's richly detailed biographies are continued in Volumes II (G-O) and III (P-Z). Thrapp has included seventeenth- and eighteenth-century figures in both New France and New England, as well as the trans-Appalachian country, but the majority are nineteenth-century men and women who discovered, settled, fought for, or simply lived in the raw lands west of the Mississippi River.
Published in 1971, Georgia's Last Frontier presents the history of one of the state's least developed regions. During the 1830s, Carroll County was a large part of Georgia's most rugged frontier. James C. Bonner examines how life in this isolated region was complicated by the presence of Native Americans, cattle rustlers, and horse thieves. He details how the discovery of gold in the Villa Rica area resulted in drunkenness and violence, but also laid the foundations of mining technology that were later used in Colorado and California. The region remained isolated until after the Civil War, when a rail line was constructed to stimulate cotton cultivation. With the development of the railway, Carroll County's frontier traditions waned in the early twentieth century.
Frank Thompson vividly recalls his experiences in gold-rush era Montana, where sought his fortune, served in the first territorial legislature, and met some of the territory's most notorious road agents.