The keen-eyed, cool-headed, and fearless men (Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Buffalo Bill Cody, Big Foot Wallace, and Captain Jim Cook, among others) who were pivotal personalities for more than half a century in the almost ceaseless task of clearing the way for and guarding the lives and properties of explorers, emigrants, and settlers in the West, are an extinct type of pioneer, Accounts of the heroic deeds of this handful of men, however, remain today as indelible records that dramatize the melting away of this country’s vast frontiers.
Cowboy and drifter Frank Clifford lived a lot of lives—and raised a lot of hell—in the first quarter of his life. The number of times he changed his name—Clifford being just one of them—suggests that he often traveled just steps ahead of the law. During the 1870s and 1880s his restless spirit led him all over the Southwest, crossing the paths of many of the era’s most notorious characters, most notably Clay Allison and Billy the Kid. More than just an entertaining and informative narrative of his Wild West adventures, Clifford’s memoir also paints a picture of how ranchers and ordinary folk lived, worked, and stayed alive during those tumultuous years. Written in 1940 and edited and annotated by Frederick Nolan, Deep Trails in the Old West is likely one of the last eyewitness histories of the old West ever to be discovered. As Frank Clifford, the author rode with outlaw Clay Allison’s Colfax County vigilantes, traveled with Charlie Siringo, cowboyed on the Bell Ranch, contended with Apaches, and mined for gold in Hillsboro. In 1880 he was one of the Panhandle cowboys sent into New Mexico to recover cattle stolen by Billy the Kid and his compañeros—and in the process he got to know the Kid dangerously well. In unveiling this work, Nolan faithfully preserves Clifford’s own words, providing helpful annotation without censoring either the author’s strong opinions or his racial biases. For all its roughness, Deep Trails in the Old West is a rich resource of frontier lore, customs, and manners, told by a man who saw the Old West at its wildest—and lived to tell the tale.
If countless books and movies are to be believed, America's Wild West was, at heart, a world of cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and gunslingers, scruffy settlers and mountain men—a man's world. Here, Chris Enss, in the latest of her popular books to take on this stereotype, tells the stories of twelve courageous women who faced down schoolrooms full of children on the open prairies and in the mining towns of the Old West. Now with five new teachers covered and a new chapter, the second edition of Frontier Teachers brings these important stories to light. Between 1847 and 1858, more than 600 women teachers traveled across the untamed frontier to provide youngsters with an education, and the numbers grew rapidly in the decades to come, as women took advantage of one of the few career opportunities for respectable work for ladies of the era. Enduring hardship, the dozen women whose stories are movingly told in the pages of Frontier Teachers demonstrated the utmost dedication and sacrifice necessary to bring formal education to the Wild West. As immortalized in works of art and literature, for many students their women teachers were heroic figures who introduced them to a world of possibilities—and changed America forever.
This family album of the Western frontier shows what daily life was like for the diverse pioneers who crossed the Mississippi during the nineteenth century. It traces the successive waves of migration identified by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 as the frontiers of the trader, the miner, the farmer and the rancher.
Who owns the West? -- Buffalo Bill and Karl May : the origins of German Western fandom -- A wall runs through it : western fans in the two Germanies -- Little houses on the prairie -- "And then the American Indians came over" : fan responses to indigenous resurgence and political change -- Indians into Confederates : historical fiction fans, reenactors, and living history.
Of all that has been written of the cowboy and the life of the cattle range, very little has been written by the principal actors themselves. The same is equally true of the famous government scouts, mail riders and other adventurous figures, who were men of deeds rather than words. Not many possessed, like David Crockett and W. F. Cody, the power to dramatize themselves. James H. Cook, the author of Fifty Years on the Old Frontier, first published in 1923, was, however, a genuine cowboy, and he was able to recount in a most readable way his adventures over half a century. During the Seventies and part of the Eighties he rode the ranges in Texas and New Mexico. A vivid account is to be found in the first part of the book of the life of the cattlemen in the Southwest, including such details as rounding up entirely wild cattle and horses, and the conveying of droves of animals hundreds of miles through extremely rough, Indian-infested territory. Those who desire thrills can find them here. The author served as government scout in the campaign against Geronimo in 1885, and later, in the North, saw much of the unfortunate troubles with the Sioux and the Cheyennes, whom he showed to have been shamefully misused by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Much space is given to the Sioux chief, Red Cloud, of whom Cook was a champion and faithful friend. Not the least entertaining parts of the book are the narratives of hunts after big game in the Rockies, during the years when Cook was one of the foremost guides and hunters of the regions bordering the one transcontinental railway. An invaluable addition to any Old West collection!
In The First American Frontier, Wilma Dunaway challenges many assumptions about the development of preindustrial Southern Appalachia's society and economy. Drawing on data from 215 counties in nine states from 1700 to 1860, she argues that capitalist exchange and production came to the region much earlier than has been previously thought. Her innovative book is the first regional history of antebellum Southern Appalachia and the first study to apply world-systems theory to the development of the American frontier. Dunaway demonstrates that Europeans established significant trade relations with Native Americans in the southern mountains and thereby incorporated the region into the world economy as early as the seventeenth century. In addition to the much-studied fur trade, she explores various other forces of change, including government policy, absentee speculation in the region's natural resources, the emergence of towns, and the influence of local elites. Contrary to the myth of a homogeneous society composed mainly of subsistence homesteaders, Dunaway finds that many Appalachian landowners generated market surpluses by exploiting a large landless labor force, including slaves. In delineating these complexities of economy and labor in the region, Dunaway provides a perceptive critique of Appalachian exceptionalism and development.
This volume contains the three lectures R. W. G. Vail delivered in the fall of 1945, in connection with his A. S. Rosenbach Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, supplemented by descriptions of 1300 bibliographical items covering the North American frontier literature over the period 1542 to 1800.
