"Granville Stuart was one of the first to raise cattle in Montana. During the 1880's cattle boom he was manager and for a time part owner of the largest outfit in Montana, the D-H-S. Most of the second volume is devoted to this period ... Stuart was an important figure in Montana, the president of the state's first stock grower's association and president of the Board of Stock Commissioners. His book has become a classic."--Bill Reese. The author did much to organize a group of latter-day vigilantes to break up a band of horse and cow thieves who became so bold in their operations that drastic measures had to be taken."--Ramon Adams
Granville Stuart (1834-1918) is a quintessential Western figure, a man whose adventures rival those of Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, or Sitting Bull, and who embodied many of the contradictions of America's westward expansion. Stuart collected guns, herded cattle, mined for gold, and killed men he thought outlaws. But he also taught himself Shoshone, French, and Spanish, denounced formal religion, married a Shoshone woman, and eventually became a United States diplomat.In this fascinating biography, Clyde A. Milner II and Carol A. O'Connor, co-editors of the acclaimed Oxford History of the American West, trace Stuart's remarkable trajectory from his birth in Virginia, through his formative years in the agricultural settlements of Iowa and the mining camps of Gold Rush California, to his rough-and-tumble life in Montana and his rise to prominence as a public figure. Along the way, we see Granville and his brother James battling bandits and horsethieves and becoming leaders of the new Montana territory. The authors explore Granville's life as a cattleman, including his role as the leader of a vigilante force, known as "Stuart's Stranglers," responsible for several hangings in 1884, his abandonment of his half-Shoshone children after his second marriage, his government service in offices ranging from the head of the Butte Public Library to U.S. Minister to Paraguay and Uruguay, and his final years, during which he composed a memoir, Forty Years on the Frontier, still widely read for its dramatic account of the era.Written with narrative flair and a lively awareness of current issues in Western history, As Big as the West fully illuminates the conflicting realities of the frontier, where a man could speak of wiping out "half-breeds" while fathering 11 mixed-race children, and go from vigilante to diplomat in the space of a few years.
Noted western historian Robert K. DeArment recounts the remarkable careers of eight men--Pat Garrett, John Hughes, Harry Love, Harry Morse, Frank Norfleet, Bass Reeves, Granville Stuart, and Tom Tobin--who pursued notorious criminals.
This book offers an analytical explanation for the origins of and change in property institutions on the American frontier during the nineteenth century. Its scope is interdisciplinary, integrating insights from political science, economics, law and history. This book shows how claim clubs - informal governments established by squatters in each of the major frontier sectors of agriculture, mining, logging and ranching - substituted for the state as a source of private property institutions and how they changed the course of who received a legal title, and for what price, throughout the nineteenth century. Unlike existing analytical studies of the frontier that emphasize one or two sectors, this book considers all major sectors, as well as the relationship between informal and formal property institutions, while also proposing a novel theory of emergence and change in property institutions that provides a framework to interpret the complicated history of land laws in the United States.
