An enormously entertaining classic, THE WAY WEST brings to life the adventure of the western passage and the pioneer spirit. The sequel to THE BIG SKY, this celebrated novel charts a frontiersman's return to the untamed West in 1846. Dick Summers, as pilot of a wagon train, guides a group of settlers on the difficult journey from Missouri to Oregon. In sensitive but unsentimental prose, Guthrie illuminates the harsh trials and resounding triumphs of pioneer life. With THE WAY WEST, he pays homage to the grandeur of the western wilderness, its stark and beautiful scenery, and its extraordinary people.
New York Times bestselling author and Newbery Honor recipient Steve Sheinkin welcomes young readers to the thrilling, tragic, and downright wild historic adventure of America’s westward expansion in Which Way to the Wild West? Everything Your Schoolbooks Didn’t Tell You About America’s Westward Expansion, featuring illustrations by Tim Robinson. 1805: Explorer William Clark reaches the Pacific Ocean and pens the badly spelled line “Ocian in view! O! the joy!” (Hey, he was an explorer, not a spelling bee champion!) 1836: Mexican general Santa Anna surrounds the Alamo, trapping 180 Texans inside and prompting Texan William Travis to declare, “I shall never surrender or retreat.” 1861: Two railroad companies, one starting in the West and one in the East, start a race to lay the most track and create a transcontinental railroad. With a storyteller's voice and attention to the details that make history real and interesting, Steve Sheinkin delivers the wild facts about America's greatest adventure. From the Louisiana Purchase (remember: if you're negotiating a treaty for your country, play it cool.) to the gold rush (there were only three ways to get to California--all of them bad) to the life of the cowboy, the Indian wars, and the everyday happenings that defined living on the frontier. “An engaging...medley of anecdotes about the Wild West in nine lively chapters starting with the Louisiana Purchase and ending with the Lakota massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Casual vignettes of famous figures and ordinary people come to life.” —School Library Journal “Sheinkin builds his conversational narrative around stories of the men and women who peopled the west, with particular attention given to African Americans, Chinese workers, and everyday farmers and cowboys. There's plenty of humor here, but Sheinkin's strength is his ability to transition between events.”—The Horn Book Also by Steve Sheinkin: Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism & Treachery The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War King George: What Was His Problem?: Everything Your Schoolbooks Didn't Tell You About the American Revolution Two Miserable Presidents: Everything Your Schoolbooks Didn't Tell You About the Civil War Born to Fly: The First Women's Air Race Across America
A novel of the early-day West in the period between 1845 and 1870 in which Dick Summers, a conservationist, seeks retribution from his former countryman Boone Caudill and companionship with Teal Eye.
Doris Ashley left Iowa and came to Montana as the frontier era came to a close and the hard transition to the modern West began. In 1925, already a widow at the age of twenty-four, she took a job as “cheap help” in Glacier National Park and thus began a lifelong affair with Montana’s landscape, wildlife, and people. Doris soon met the love of her life, native son Dan Huffine, another park worker with an abiding love for the region. Together, they shared many adventures over the next sixty years, helping to shape the character of northwest Montana and participating in the growth of Glacier Park on both sides of the Continental Divide. Between them, the Huffines shared stints as backcountry park ranger, driver of the classic red tour buses in the park, and cook for the crew that did the perilous work surveying the famous Going-to-the-Sun Road. The couple operated tourist camps along the Glacier Park boundary and became co-proprietors of the Huffine Montana Museum. Many people considered the couple endearingly eccentric, and for good reason, as they kept skunks, badgers, coyotes, bears, a mountain goat, and a beaver as pets. The Huffines were also world-class raconteurs, and enjoyed telling their tales later in life to author John Fraley, who shared their love of the outdoors and of Glacier Park. Using many hours of tape recordings, numerous journals, and a great deal of research, Fraley has pieced together the story of Doris’s early life in Iowa, her fateful meeting with Dan, and their love story, which is also very much a work story—a tale of building a life together while at the same time helping to shape the “Crown of the Continent” region.
'An inspiring, uplifting, heartfelt and funny memoir that made me howl with laughter throughout. A wonderful read.' - Kevin Hand, BBC London. You're in Greece and are given a e20 note with an email address scribbled on it. What would you do: 1. Spend it? 2. Slip the suspect counterfeit bill into an enemy's birthday card? 3. Send an email, hoping it will lead to you finding everlasting love? Brad, a hopeless romantic, chose the latter. Two years later, his love life remains a disaster and his career is misfiring. As he's about to walk Spain's fabled Camino de Santiago to ponder some profound life changes, Brad receives a reply. Incredibly, it's from a woman who lives on the 1000-year-old pilgrim path, far away from where the money first crossed his palm. She invites him to sleep... 'on her house'. Hiking nine hundred kilometres on the Road to Santiago to a blind date with the mystery e20 woman, he discovers the utopia of his fantasies, befriends a Hungarian who speaks English in song titles and has his raison d'être revealed to him by a barefoot Mayan mystic. Will he meet his happily-ever-after too? Buy this pacy, exuberant, laugh-out-loud travelogue laced with tips for fellow pilgrims to find out...
History of the West with Jemmey Fletcher; Ride to Rendezvous is the first book in the Jemmey Fletcher series. This book follows young Jemmey Fletcher as he decides to leave his Missouri homestead, and strike out for the mountains. Along the way he meets a colorful mountain man named Laramie, who breaks the greenhorn in. As Jemmey makes his way to a mountain man rendezvous, he'll have to battle hunger, thunderstorms, attacking Indians, and most often himself to find out if he has what it takes to be a Rocky Mountain trapper. The first of a series, Jemmey Fletcher books were written to take students on an adventure through the American frontier in a historically accurate way. Each book was written to tell a particular story of the West, and highlight a specific event, or time period of that history. Written for educational purposes by award winning teacher Cody Assmann, each chapter has reflection questions to reinforce the factual information contained in the chapter. Many chapters also end with extension research links, to allow students the opportunity to continue learning about factual events or people portrayed in this book of historical fiction. Finally, nearly all the chapters end with an extension activity that students can complete at home. These activities have been developed to enhance student's grasp of history, by actually participating in historical skills. Not only will the reader get to learn about history in a fun and entertaining way, but they will also get the opportunity to live out scenes from the book.
Rediscovered in the 1980s, Dawn Powell is now widely acknowledged as one of the best 20th century American writers. Come Back to Sorrento' centres around the life of Connie Benjamin, a village shoemaker's wife, who was raised in a wealthy household and had pretensions toward an operatic career, and Blaine Decker, the new high school music teacher, a homosexual in a closeted era. Drawn together into a powerful friendship of dependence, they transend the monotony of their lives to create a drama richer than reality.'
