**"The best all-around study of the American cowboy ever written. Every page crackles with keen analysis and vivid prose about the Old West. A must-read!" —Douglas Brinkley, The New York Times–bestselling author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for AmericaThe open-range cattle era lasted barely a quarter century, but it left America irrevocably changed. Cattle Kingdom reveals how the West rose and fell, and how its leg...

Christopher Knowlton, author of Cattle Kingdom and former Fortune writer, takes an in-depth look at the spectacular Florida land boom of the 1920s and shows how it led directly to the Great Depression.The 1920s in Florida was a time of incredible excess, immense wealth, and precipitous collapse. The decade there produced the largest human migration in American history, far exceeding the settlement of the West, as millions flocked to the grand hote...

Christopher Knowlton, author of Cattle Kingdom and former Fortune writer, takes an in-depth look at the spectacular Florida land boom of the 1920s and shows how it led directly to the Great Depression.The 1920s in Florida was a time of incredible excess, immense wealth, and precipitous collapse. The decade there produced the largest human migration in American history, far exceeding the settlement of the West, as millions flocked to the grand hote...

The West was a lawless domain when Jerry Potts was born into the Upper Missouri fur trade in 1838. The son of a Scottish father and a Blood mother, he was given the name Bear Child by his Blood tribe for his bravery and tenacity while he was still a teen. In 1874, when the North West Mounted Police first marched west and sat lost and starving near the Canada-U.S. border, it was Potts who led them to shelter. Over the next 22 years he played a critical role in the peaceful settlement of the...

In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story of the Dust Bowl rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows.The dust storms that terrorized America’s High Plains during the Great Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding bla...

On 14 May 1804, one Captain Meriwether Lewis and his companion William Clark led a thirty-three-man expedition to the new lands of Louisiana. 8,000 miles and two years later, after rafting up the Missouri and crossing the Rocky Mountains, they reached the far side of the world, the Pacific Ocean.Fredrick Nolan explores the first US settlers of the American West, including the remarkable stories of unsung heroes and heroines, the bloody battles between settlers and the native Americ...

In the nail-biting western *Last Stand at Sabre River*, a Civil War veteran returns home to find a Yankee's private army living on his land, while another enemy waits to strike...**Paul Cable has come home to Saber River, Arizona. But things have changed since he went away to fight for the Confederacy. A gang of Union men have taken over his house, and they’re refusing to give it back. It seems the war is not over yet for Cable. He is determined to fight for his fa...

National Book Award–winner Timothy Egan turns his historian's eye to the largest-ever forest fire in America and offers an epic, cautionary tale for our time.On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and ti...

The stories of the men and women who dug for gold on Williams Creek are told in this revised and updated edition of a Canadian bestseller.The legendary town of Barkerville is flourishing today, just as it did more than 150 years ago, but this time under the care of professional and amateur historians. Richard Thomas Wright peels back the pages of history as he unearths the area’s history and chronicles the fortunes and the follies of gold-rush-era Barkerville. The result of years o...

Bronc Busters and Hay Sloops tells the story of ranching in the West from the beginning of the Great War until 1960. Cowboy soldiers, bronc busters, First Nations, upper-crust Englishmen and the strong, capable women of ranching country . . . theirs are the stories told in this book. Some of these characters are larger than life, such as:Joe Coutlee, cow boss of the Douglas Lake Ranch, whose booming voice gave him the nickname “Roaring Bill”;Grover Hance, w...

Remarkable cattle drives, famous ranches and legendary characters are at the heart of Ken Mather's account of the early days of ranching in British Columbia. These are stories about drovers, ranchers, cowboys and "mud pups" (the remittance men of the ranching industry). You'll meet such people asthe flamboyant Harper brothers, drovers who went on to become the biggest landowners in BC, with interests in the Harper, Perry, Hat Creek and famous Gang ranchesJohnny Wils...

Despite being neighbouring provinces with long ranching histories, British Columbia and Alberta saw their ranching techniques develop quite differently. As most ranching styles were based on one of the two dominant styles in use south of the border, BC ranchers tended to adopt the California style whereas Alberta took its lead from Texas. But the different practices actually go back much further. Cattle cultures in southwestern Spain, sub-Saharan Africa and the British highlands all shaped...