This historical novel describes the last great land giveaway, the 1893 Land Run into the Cherokee Strip, Indian Territory, where my father's family homesteaded. This story of the Darbys and the McCanns is based in part on my grandparents' travel logs and diary and tells how these close friends endured hardships and tragedies near the Cimarron River by Glass Mountain (front cover) at Orienta, Oklahoma, where they raised their families. Read of their journey in wagons with over-jets and how they built and lived in their soddies with cat-and-claw chimneys. Read about the extraordinary life of a small Indian boy abandoned during the Land Run, but adopted by the McCanns and how he rose to greatness. This story of the love these families and their children shared throughout their lives, along with family photographs and vivid descriptions of age-old Indian rituals of birth, marriage, and death will remain in your memory.This book is purchased at the lowest cost through Lulu.com.
This comprehensive guide to the versatile mesquite tree covers its various species and many uses, from food to furniture to rangeland management. A reliable source of food and shelter even in the severest droughts, the mesquite tree sustained American Indians in the Southwest for centuries. Today, mesquite is popular for barbecuing, woodworking, furniture making, flooring, sculpture, jewelry, and food products ranging from honey to jelly and syrup. Even ranchers, who once fought to eradicate mesquite, have come to value its multiple uses on well-managed rangeland. In this accessible volume, one of the world's leading authorities on mesquite presents a wealth of information about its natural history and commercial, agricultural, and woodworking uses. Ken Rogers describes the life cycle, species, and wide distribution of the mesquite, which is native or naturalized not only in the Southwest and Mexico, but also in India, Africa, Australia, South America, and Hawaii. Rogers discusses the many consumer and woodworker uses of mesquite, even giving instructions for laying a mesquite wood floor and making mesquite bean jelly. He also looks into the ways that people are using mesquite in nature, from rangeland management in the Southwest to desertification prevention in arid countries.
Winner of a 2019 Southwest Book Award (BRLA) An homage to the useful and idiosyncratic mesquite tree In his latest book, Mesquite, Gary Paul Nabhan employs humor and contemplative reflection to convince readers that they have never really glimpsed the essence of what he calls "arboreality." As a Franciscan brother and ethnobotanist who has often mixed mirth with earth, laughter with landscape, food with frolic, Nabhan now takes on a large, many-branched question: What does it means to be a tree, or, accordingly, to be in a deep and intimate relationship with one? To answer this question, Nabhan does not disappear into a forest but exposes himself to some of the most austere hyper-arid terrain on the planet--the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts along the US/Mexico border--where even the most ancient perennial plants are not tall and thin, but stunted and squat. There, in desert regions that cover more than a third of our continent, mesquite trees have become the staff of life, not just for indigenous cultures, but for myriad creatures, many of which respond to these "nurse plants" in wildly intelligent and symbiotic ways. In this landscape, where Nabhan claims that nearly every surviving being either sticks, stinks, stings, or sings, he finds more lives thriving than you could ever shake a stick at. As he weaves his arid yarns, we suddenly realize that our normal view of the world has been turned on its head: where we once saw scarcity, there is abundance; where we once perceived severity, there is whimsy. Desert cultures that we once assumed lived in "food deserts" are secretly savoring a most delicious world. Drawing on his half-century of immersion in desert ethnobotany, ecology, linguistics, agroforestry, and eco-gastronomy, Nabhan opens up for us a hidden world that we had never glimpsed before. Along the way, he explores the sensuous reality surrounding this most useful and generous tree. Mesquite is a book that will delight mystics and foresters, naturalists and foodies. It combines cutting-edge science with a generous sprinkling of humor and folk wisdom, even including traditional recipes for cooking with mesquite.
"A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert provides the most complete collection of Sonoran Desert natural history information ever compiled and is a perfect introduction to this biologically rich desert of North America."--BOOK JACKET.
The seventh edition of this book includes chapter overviews, checkpoints, detailed summaries, summary tables, a list of key terms and end-of-chapter questions. There is also a new chapter on recombinant DNA technology, plant biotechnology, and genomics.
