Few infantry regiments in the Civil War compiled a more distinguished record than the Fifth Missouri. The unique blending of fiery Irish Confederates from St. Louis with rural pro-Southern Missourians forged an unshakable esprit de corps, making the unit the crack infantry regiment in the western sector. Most of Colonel James C. McCown's troops were young men in their 20s, and their good health and physical conditioning allowed them to carry out their "shock" missions throughout the region. From the perspective of the common soldiers and the unit's leaders the activities and battles of the Fifth Missouri are recounted here.
The Mississippi battle between Grant’s and Pemberton’s forces that sealed Vicksburg’s fate. The Battle of Champion Hill was the decisive land engagement of the Vicksburg Campaign. The fighting on May 16, 1863, took place just twenty miles east of the river city, where the advance of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Federal army attacked Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton’s hastily gathered Confederates. The bloody fighting seesawed back and forth until superior Union leadership broke apart the Southern line, sending Pemberton’s army into headlong retreat. The victory on Mississippi’s wooded hills sealed the fate of both Vicksburg and her large field army, propelled Grant into the national spotlight, and earned him the command of the entire US armed forces. Timothy Smith, a historian for the National Park Service, has written the definitive account of this long-overlooked battle. This book, winner of a nonfiction prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, is grounded upon years of primary research, rich in analysis and strategic and tactical action, and a compelling read.
Two dozen pioneering men and women talk about life out west on the downward slope of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth. It was still rough and raw. Paul Gray rode the cattle trails of the Staked Plain, where ?nobody asked anybody?s name? because ?it wasn?t courtesy.? Jake Goss recalls the fuss when chickens raised on Salt Creek in western Colorado were found to have gold in their craws. J. Selby Batt?s father owned a general store in Wells, Nevada, where a lady could buy yards of ribbon and a gallon of whiskey. ø Other old-timers reminisce about characters like Bat Masterson and the Tabors, range wars, unpopular government representatives, wild longhorns and marauding wolves, boom towns turned ghostly, and unsolved mysteries. Here, too, are the voices of miners, schoolteachers, dentists, businessmen, traveling salesmen, journalists, and writers from frontier Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, and beyond. In an arena like this, ?You could do anything you was big enough to do.?
Idealistic easterner Wayne Cameron helps to build telegraph lines across the West, facing buffalo stampedes, Indian raids, timber rustlers, and rugged nature.
Since the shocking news first broke in 1876 of the Seventh Cavalry’s disastrous defeat at the Little Big Horn, fascination with the battle—and with Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer—has never ceased. Widespread interest in the subject has spawned a vast outpouring of literature, which only increases with time. This two-volume bibliography of Custer literature is the first to be published in some twenty-five years and the most complete ever assembled. Drawing on years of research, Michael O’Keefe has compiled entries for roughly 3,000 books and 7,000 articles and pamphlets. Covering both nonfiction and fiction (but not juvenile literature), the bibliography focuses on events beginning with Custer’s tenure at West Point during the 1850s and ending with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Included within this span are Custer’s experiences in the Civil War and in Texas, the 1873 Yellowstone and 1874 Black Hills expeditions, the Great Sioux War of 1876–77, and the Seventh Cavalry’s pursuit of the Nez Perces in 1877. The literature on Custer, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and the Seventh Cavalry touches the entire American saga of exploration, conflict, and settlement in the West, including virtually all Plains Indian tribes, the frontier army, railroading, mining, and trading. Hence this bibliography will be a valuable resource for a broad audience of historians, librarians, collectors, and Custer enthusiasts.
These essays range widely throughout the history of the Civil War North, using new methods and sources to reexamine old theories and discover new aspects of the nation's greatest conflict. Many of these issues are just as important today as they were a century and a half ago. What were the extent and limits of wartime dissent in the North? How could a president most effectively present himself to the public? Can the savagery of war ever be tamed? How did African Americans create and maintain their families?
E-artnow presents to you the ultimate Zane Grey collection, a book set consisting of the most notable novels and stories by this great author of the Western genre. Zane Grey,played a significant role in shaping the myths of the Wild West and paved the way for the western genre as one of its pioneers and the greatest writers of the genre. This edition includes: Betty Zane The Spirit of the Border The Last of the Plainsmen The Last Trail The Heritage of the Desert The Young Forester The Young Lion Hunter Riders of the Purple Sage Desert Gold The Light of the Western Stars The Rustlers of Pecos County The Lone Star Ranger Rainbow Trail The Border Legion Wildfire The UP Trail The Desert of Wheat The Man of the Forest The Mysterious Rider To the Last Man Tales of Lonely Trails Wanderer of the Wasteland Tappan's Burro The Call of the Canyon Roping Lions in the Grand Canyon The Thundering Herd The Vanishing American Under the Tonto Rim Captives of the Desert Wild Horse Mesa The Deer Stalker From Missouri The Great Slave Yaqui Tigre The Rubber Hunter The Ranger Canyon Walls Avalanche Forlorn River Nevada The Shepherd of Guadaloupe Sunset Pass Arizona Ames Robbers' Roost The Drift Fence The Hash Knife Outfit The Code of the West Thunder Mountain The Trail Driver West of the Pecos Raiders of Spanish Peaks Knights of the Range Thirty Thousand on the Hoof Twin Sombreros Majesty's Rancho The Wilderness Trek Valley of Wild Horses Lost Pueblo Black Mesa Stranger from the Tonto The Fugitive Trail Arizona Clan Stairs of Sand The Lost Wagon Train Shadow on the Trail The Maverick Queen The Dude Ranger Wyoming Horse Heaven Hill Fighting Caravans Western Union
The Chinook Indians, who originally lived at the mouth of the Columbia River in present-day Oregon and Washington, were experienced traders long before the arrival of white men to that area. When Captain Robert Gray in the ship Columbia Rediviva, for which the river was named, entered the Columbia in 1792, he found the Chinooks in an important position in the trade system between inland Indians and those of the Northwest Coast. The system was based on a small seashell, the dentalium, as the principal medium of exchange. The Chinooks traded in such items as sea otter furs, elkskin armor which could withstand arrows, seagoing canoes hollowed from the trunks of giant trees, and slaves captured from other tribes. Chinook women held equal status with the men in the trade, and in fact the women were preferred as traders by many later ships' captains, who often feared and distrusted the Indian men. The Chinooks welcomed white men not only for the new trade goods they brought, but also for the new outlets they provided Chinook goods, which reached Vancouver Island and as far north as Alaska. The trade was advantageous for the white men, too, for British and American ships that carried sea otter furs from the Northwest Coast to China often realized enormous profits. Although the first white men in the trade were seamen, land-based traders set up posts on the Columbia not long after American explorers Lewis and Clark blazed the trail from the United States to the Pacific Northwest in 1805. John Jacob Astor's men founded the first successful white trading post at Fort Astoria, the site of today's Astoria, Oregon, and the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company soon followed into the territory. As more white men moved into the area, the Chinooks began to lose their favored position as middlemen in the trade. Alcohol; new diseases such as smallpox, influenza, and venereal disease; intertribal warfare; and the growing number of white settlers soon led to the near extinction of the Chinooks. By 1&51, when the first treaty was made between them and the United States government, they were living in small, fragmented bands scattered throughout the territory. Today the Chinook Indians are working to revive their tribal traditions and history and to establish a new tribal economy within the white man's system.
