South Pass and Its Tales
Author: James L. Sherlock
Publisher: Wolverine Distributing, Incorporated
Published: 1988-04
Total Pages: 164
ISBN-13:
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South Pass
Author: Will Bagley
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2014-05
Total Pages: 329
ISBN-13: 0806145110
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWallace Stegner called South Pass “one of the most deceptive and impressive places in the West.” Nowhere can travelers cross the Rockies so easily as through this high, treeless valley in Wyoming immediately south of the Wind River Mountains. South Pass has received much attention in lore and memory but attracted no serious book-length study—until now. In this narrative, award-winning author Will Bagley explains the significance of South Pass to the nation’s history and to the development of the American West. Fur traders first saw South Pass in 1812. From the early 1840s until the completion of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads almost forty years later, emigrants on the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails used South Pass in transforming the American West in a single generation. Bagley traces the peopling of the region by the earliest inhabitants and adventurers, including Indian peoples, trappers and fur traders, missionaries, and government-commissioned explorers. Later, California gold rushers, Latter-day Saints, and families seeking new lives went through this singular gap in the Rockies. Without South Pass, overland wagons beginning their journey far to the east along the Missouri River could not have reached their destinations in a single season, and western settlement might have been delayed for decades. The story of South Pass offers a rich history. The Overland Stage, Pony Express, and first transcontinental telegraph all came through the region. Nearly a century later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower designated South Pass as one of America’s first National Historic Landmarks. An American place so rich in historical significance, Bagley argues, deserves the best of historical preservation efforts.
Twenty Thousand Roads
Author: Virginia Scharff
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 239
ISBN-13: 9780520237773
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Virginia Scharff's wonderfully readable account of women in motion complicates and enriches our understanding of the nineteenth and twentieth century Wests. Her gendered remapping of the regional landscape explodes traditional notions of western movement. All students of women and gender, travel and place, the West and America, would do well to read this excellent book."--David M. Wrobel, author of Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West "Virginia Scharff claims for women what has long been central to the masculine mythology of the West--free movement and its many gifts, real and imagined. Her book is as exhilarating and as intellectually and emotionally expansive as our enduring dream of flight across the American land."--Elliott West, author of The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado "Brilliant is not a word that is often a part of my critical vocabulary, but brilliantly is how Twenty Thousand Roads begins. When writing of Sacagawea and Susan Magoffin, Virginia Scharff shows vividly how a single life can be a source of sophisticated cultural analysis without becoming an academic artifact or an object of condescension."--Richard White, author of It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West
Calamity Jane and Her Siblings: The Saga of Lena and Elijah Canary
Author: Jan Cerney
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 160
ISBN-13: 1467119393
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe mere mention of Calamity Jane conjures up images of buckskins, bull whips and dance halls, but there's more to the woman than the storied legend she became. Born Martha Canary, she was orphaned as a child and assumed the responsibility of caring for her siblings. Much too young and ambitious to rear a family, she found homes for all. After setting off on her own, Martha tried to reconnect with her fractured family in her typical haphazard fashion, all the while transforming into Calamity Jane. Soon, her own foibles and her siblings' choices rendered the attempt futile. From brother Elijah's horse thieving to sister Lena's denial of Martha's tales, author Jan Cerney uncovers the tumultuous Canary family often overlooked in the Calamity canon.
Empire and Liberty
Author: Virginia Scharff
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2015-04-09
Total Pages: 242
ISBN-13: 0520281268
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEmpire and Liberty brings together two epic subjects in American history: the story of the struggle to end slavery that reached a violent climax in the Civil War, and the story of the westward expansion of the United States. Virginia Scharff and the contributors to this volume show how the West shaped the conflict over slavery and how slavery shaped the West, in the process defining American ideals about freedom and influencing battles over race, property, and citizenship. This innovative work embraces East and West, as well as North and South, as the United States observes the 2015 sesquicentennial commemoration of the end of the Civil War. A companion volume to an Autry National Center exhibition on the Civil War and the West, Empire and Liberty brings leading historians together to examine artifacts, objects, and artworks that illuminate this period of national expansion, conflict, and renewal.
Calamity Jane
Author: Richard W. Etulain
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2015-08-25
Total Pages: 277
ISBN-13: 080615263X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis exhaustive bibliographical reference will be the first stop for anyone looking for Calamity Jane in print, film, or photograph—and wanting to know how reliable those sources may be. Richard W. Etulain, renowned western-U.S. historian and the author of a recent biography of this charismatic figure, enumerates and assesses the most valuable sources on Calamity Jane’s life and legend in newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and movies, as well as historical and government archives. Etulain begins with a brief biography of Martha Canary, aka Calamity Jane (1856–1903), then analyzes the origins and growth of her legends. The sources, Etulain shows, reveal three versions of Calamity Jane. In the most popular one, she was a Wild Woman of the Old West who helped push a roaring frontier through its final stages. This is the Calamity Jane who fought Indians, marched with the military, and took on the bad guys. Early in her life she also hoped to embody the pioneer woman, seeking marriage and a stable family and home. A third, later version made of Calamity an angel of mercy who reached out to the poor and nursed smallpox victims no one else would help. The hyperbolic journalism of the Old West, as well as dime novels and the stretchers Calamity herself told in her interviews and autobiography, shaped her legends through much of the twentieth century. Many of the sensational early accounts of Calamity’s life, Etulain notes, were based on rumor and hearsay. In illuminating the role of the Deadwood Dick dime novel series and other pulp fiction in shaping what we know—or think we know—of the American West, Etulain underscores one of his fascinating themes: the power of popular culture. The product of twenty years’ labor sifting fact from falsehood or distortion, this bibliography and reader’s guide includes brief discussions of nearly every item’s contents, along with a terse, entertaining evaluation of its reliability.
Tales from the Haunted South
Author: Tiya Miles
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2015-08-12
Total Pages: 175
ISBN-13: 1469626349
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of "ghost tours," frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. "Dark tourism" often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the physical abuse and torture of black bodies to the supposedly exotic nature of African spiritual practices. Because the realities of slavery are largely absent from these tours, Miles reveals how they continue to feed problematic "Old South" narratives and erase the hard truths of the Civil War era. In an incisive and engaging work, Miles uses these troubling cases to shine light on how we feel about the Civil War and race, and how the ghosts of the past are still with us.
Eye of the Blackbird
Author: Holly L. Skinner
Publisher: Big Earth Publishing
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 9781555663124
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom California to the Klondike, prospector Holly Skinner follows a trail of gold across the nineteenth -century American West. Living in a ghost town on Wyoming's South Pass, she steps back into a world where gold ruled the passions of those who pursued it and changed the shape of the nation that found it. In a style reminiscent of John McPhee, Skinner weaves the story of her own solitudinous search for the precious metal into her accounts of the gold rushes that so dramatically accelerated the westward movement.
Tales and Sketches
Author: Hugh Miller
Publisher: New York : Hurst, [18--?]
Published: 1863
Total Pages: 416
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTall Tale America
Author: Walter Blair
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2018-12-01
Total Pages: 285
ISBN-13: 022622791X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crockett, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan and John Henry have all become heroes of American folklore. Some of them, like Crokett, were real, but all have become the subject of tall tales. This is a folksy history of the United States, told as if the characters were all real. This panoramic (if completely untrue) history begins with Columbus. . . . En route to its end in the 1940s (where traditional American heroes are enlisted to fight in World War II), it covers the great and small events of our national history, including the overlooked, but important ones, such as the invention of the prairie dog."—Washington Post Book World
