Richard W. Etulain – författare

The American West is the only book-length historical overview of the post-1900 American West. This balanced, comprehensive account of the modern West skillfully delineates the changes and resulting complexities that characterize the twentieth-century West. The authors consider the ways in which urban, service, and computer-related industries have replaced rural, extractive, and agricultural economies. They also trace the steps by which western politics shifted from New Deal principles to more conservative, Republican policies. The book examines the roles of racial and ethnic groups in the recent West, emphasizing the challenges facing Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans in the region. Other chapters discuss western women, families, and urban developments. Thorough coverage of cultural topics—literature, art, films, religion, and education—includes lively descriptions of important individuals and memorable events. This Bison Books edition, which features a new chapter covering the mid-1980s to 2005 and bibliographic essays on books about the modern American West, offers the most up-to-date discussion of the contemporary American West available.

Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine.Before Calamity Jane became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared under a landslide of purple prose.Calamity became a hostess and dancer in Deadwood's saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn't get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could filmmakers.Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian Richard W. Etulain's account begins with a biography that offers new information on Calamity's several ""husbands"" (including one she legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the stories that have shaped Calamity Jane's reputation. Some Calamity portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a husband and family. As the 2004-2006 HBO series Deadwood makes clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on - raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever.

This 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.

Western fans today may not recognize the name Ernest Haycox (1899-1950), but they know his work. John Ford turned one of his stories into the iconic film Stagecoach, and the whole Western literary genre still follows conventions that Haycox deftly mastered and reshaped. In this new book about Haycox's literary career, Richard W. Etulain tells the engrossing story of his rise through the ranks of popular magazine and serial fiction to become one of the Western's most successful creators.After graduating from the University of Oregon in 1923 with a degree in journalism, Haycox began his quest to break into New York's pulp magazine scene, submitting dozens of stories before he began to make a living from his writing. By the end of the 1920s he had become a top writer for Western Story, Short Stories, and Adventure, among other popular weeklies and monthlies.Ernest Haycox and the Western traces Haycox's path from rank beginner, to crack pulp writer, to regular contributor to Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. Etulain shows how Haycox experimented with techniques to deepen and broaden his Westerns, creating more introspective protagonists (Hamlet heroes), introducing new types of heroines (the brunette vixen, the blonde Puritan), and weaving greater historical realism into his plots. After reaching the height of success with his best-selling Custer novel, Bugles in the Afternoon (1944), Haycox moved away from the financially rewarding but artistically constricting Western formula - only to achieve his final coup with The Earthbreakers, a historical novel about the end of the Oregon Trail, published posthumously in 1952.Reconstructing the career of a popular literary giant, Ernest Haycox and the Western restores Haycox to his rightful place in the history of Western literature.

Generations of Americans have seen the West as beyond federal control and direction. But the national government's presence in the West dates to before Lewis and Clark, and since 1789 a number of U.S. presidents have had a penetrating and long-lasting impact on the region. In Presidents Who Shaped the American West, noted historians Glenda Riley and Richard W. Etulain present startling analyses of chief executives and their policies, illuminating the long reach of presidential power.The authors begin each chapter by sketching a particular president's biography and explaining the political context in which he operated while in office. They then consider overarching actions and policies that affected both the nation and the region during the president's administration, such as Thomas Jefferson's augmentation of the West via the Louisiana Purchase, and Andrew Jackson's removal of American Indians from the Southeast to ""Indian Country"" in the West.Abraham Lincoln's promotion of the Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad, and western territories and states free of slavery marked further extensions of presidential power in the region. Theodore Roosevelt's conservation efforts and Jimmy Carter's expansion of earlier policies reflected growing public concern with the West's finite natural resources and fragile natural environment. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Dwight D. Eisenhower's highway program, and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society funneled federal funding into the West. In return for this largesse, some argued, the West paid the price of increased federal hegemony, and Ronald Reagan's presidency arguably curbed that power. Riley and Etulain also discuss the most recent presidential terms and the region's growing political power in Congress and the federal bureaucracy.With an accessible approach, Presidents Who Shaped the American West establishes the crucial and formative nature of the relationship between the White House and the West - and will encourage readers to continue examining this relationship.

Even before he was shot and killed in 1881, Billy the Kid's charisma and murderous career were generating stories that belied his brief life - and that only multiplied, growing to legendary proportions after his death at age twenty-one. In Thunder in the West, Richard W. Etulain takes the true measure of Billy, the man and the legend, and presents the clearest picture yet of his life and his ever-shifting place and presence in the cultural landscape of the Old West.Billy the Kid - born Henry McCarty in 1859, and also known as William H. Bonney - emerges from these pages in all his complexity, at once a gentleman and gregarious companion, and a thief and violent murderer. Tapping new depths of research, Etulain traces Billy's short life from his mysterious origins in the East through his wanderings in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. As we move from his peripatetic early years through the wild West to his fatal involvement in the Lincoln County Wars, we see the impressionable boy give way to the conflicted young man and, finally, to the opportunistic and often amoral outlaw who was out for himself, for revenge, and for whatever he could steal along the way.Against this deftly drawn portrait, Etulain considers the stories and myths spawned by Billy's life and death. Beginning with the dime novels featuring Billy the Kid, even during his lifetime, and ranging across the myriad newspaper accounts, novels, and movies that alternately celebrated his outlaw life and condemned his exploits, Etulain offers a uniquely informed view of the changing interpretations that have shaped and reshaped the reputation of this enduring icon of the Old West. In his portrayal, Billy the Kid lives on, not as a cut-throat desperado or a young charmer but as both - hero and villain, myth and man, fully realized in this twenty-first-century interpretation.

A central character in legends and histories of the Old West, Billy the Kid rivals such western icons as Jesse James and General George Armstrong Custer for the number of books and movies his brief, violent life inspired. Billy the Kid: A Reader's Guide introduces readers to the most significant of these written and filmed works. Compiled and written by a respected historian of the Old West and author of a masterful new biography of Billy the Kid, this reader's guide includes summaries and evaluations of biographies, histories, novels, and movies, as well as archival sources and research collections.Surveying newspaper articles, books, pamphlets, essays, and book chapters, Richard W. Etulain traces the shifting views of Billy the Kid from his own era to the present. Etulain's discussion of novels and movies reveals a similar shift, even as it points out both the historical inaccuracies and the literary and cinematic achievements of these works. A brief section on the authentic and supposed photographs of the Kid demonstrates the difficulties specialists and collectors have encountered in locating dependable photographic sources.This discerning overview will guide readers through the plethora of words and images generated by Billy the Kid's life and legend over more than a century. It will prove invaluable to those interested in the demigods of the Old West - and in the ever-changing cultural landscape in which they appear to us.

Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine.Before Calamity Jane became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared under a landslide of purple prose.Calamity became a hostess and dancer in Deadwood's saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn't get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could filmmakers.Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian Richard W. Etulain's account begins with a biography that offers new information on Calamity's several 'husbands' (including one she legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the stories that have shaped Calamity Jane's reputation. Some Calamity portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a husband and family. As the 2004 - 2006 HBO series Deadwood makes clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on - raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever.

In a career in public office spanning five decades, Mark Odom Hatfield (1922-2011) never lost an election. First elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1950, he retired from political office in 1997 after serving as Oregon state senator, secretary of state, and governor and as United States senator for five terms. He was arguably the state’s most important politician, but his brand of liberal-to-moderate Republicanism has long since vanished from the political stage. Mark O. Hatfield: Oregon Statesman tells Hatfield’s story-as an Oregonian, a politician, and a man of practical vision, deep convictions, and far-reaching consequence in the civic life of the state and the nation.A lifelong evangelical Christian and Republican-per his mother’s fondest wishes-and politically inclined from a young age, Hatfield came to office after studying and teaching political science and observing firsthand the ravages of war in the Pacific and the cruelty of segregation at home. Historian Richard W. Etulain portrays Hatfield as an energetic young Republican legislator in a state becoming increasingly Democratic. He pushed civil rights legislation, supported laborers as well as business interests, and struck a balance that would align him with moderates even as the party’s conservative wing became ascendant. Elected in 1958 as Oregon’s youngest-ever governor, Hatfield went on to become the first in the twentieth century to hold that office for two terms, using his tenure to streamline the state’s executive branch and promote Oregon as a prime destination for business and tourism-efforts that quickly earned him a place on the national stage. Etulain focuses on Hatfield as a force in Oregon state politics but also examines his long tenure as a U.S. senator, garnering attention early for his stance against the Vietnam War and later for his antinuclear position.The private life, the public figure, the man of faith and family, of an older West and the new: this biography, while compact, captures Mark Hatfield in full, as a major western politician of the twentieth century.

A central character in legends and histories of the Old West, Billy the Kid rivals such western icons as Jesse James and General George Armstrong Custer for the number of books and movies his brief, violent life inspired. Billy the Kid: A Reader’s Guide introduces readers to the most significant of these written and filmed works. Compiled and written by a respected historian of the Old West and author of a masterful new biography of Billy the Kid, this reader’s guide includes summaries and evaluations of biographies, histories, novels, and movies, as well as archival sources and research collections.Surveying newspaper articles, books, pamphlets, essays, and book chapters, Richard W. Etulain traces the shifting views of Billy the Kid from his own era to the present. Etulain’s discussion of novels and movies reveals a similar shift, even as it points out both the historical inaccuracies and the literary and cinematic achievements of these works. A brief section on the authentic and supposed photographs of the Kid demonstrates the difficulties specialists and collectors have encountered in locating dependable photographic sources.This discerning overview will guide readers through the plethora of words and images generated by Billy the Kid’s life and legend over more than a century. It will prove invaluable to those interested in the demigods of the Old West—and in the ever-changing cultural landscape in which they appear to us.

This volume explores Abraham Lincoln’s ties to the American West, bringing together a variety of scholars and experts who offer a look at the sixteenth president’s legacy in the territory beyond the Mississippi River. Included in this collection are an examination of Lincoln’s opposition to the Mexican War; a discussion of antislavery politics as applied to the West; perspectives on Lincoln’s views on the Thirteenth Amendment and his reluctance to admit Nevada to the Union; a look at the impact of the Radical Republicans on Lincoln’s patronage and appointments; and discussion of Lincoln’s favorable treatment of New Mexico and Arizona in an effort to garner their loyalty to the Union. Also analyzed is “The Tribe of Abraham”—Lincoln’s less-than-competent appointments in Washington Territory—and the ways in which Lincoln’s political friends in the Western Territories influenced his western policies. Other essays look at Lincoln’s dealings with the Mormons of Utah, who supported the president in exchange for his tolerance, and Native Americans, whose relations with the government suffered as the president’s attention was consumed by the Civil War. Loaded with a wealth of information, Lincoln Looks West explores yet another dimension to this dynamic leader and to the history of the American West.

This new historical overview tells the dramatic story of the American West from its prehistory to the present. A narrative history, it covers the region from the North Dakota-to-Texas states to the Pacific Coast. This West has always been home to richly diverse cultural groups, including today's growing numbers of Indian, Hispanic, and Asian Americans. Other distinctions have marked the Western past: first, the differences among prehistoric peoples and among hundreds of Indian tribes at first white contact; next, the varied western subcultures that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; third the social, cultural, and political complexities of the West in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In ""Beyond the Missouri"", Richard Etulain provides a fresh, balanced narrative of this geographically and culturally vast area and emphasises two themes: change and complexity. His perspective is neither the too-optimistic, homogenised position of the Turnerian school of historians nor the less optimistic, conflicted approach of the Revisionist Western historians. Etulain begins his study with a discussion of western landscapes and Native inhabitants. He next examines the Spanish Southwest, colonial rivalries, mountain men, missionaries, and the Oregon Trail. Then Etulain looks at Mormons, miners, western communities, ranching and farming, and transportation networks. He treats western frontier social patterns and cultures and contributes several chapters on the modern West, including the pre-World War II and the Cold War Wests. Etulain concludes with today's continuing search for an American West. Each of the fifteen chapters contains a helpful list of suggested readings.

Distinguished historian Richard W. Etulain brings together a generous selection of essays from his sixty-year career as a specialist on the US West in this essential volume. Each essay provides an invaluable overview of the rise of western literary history and historiography--including insightful evaluations of individual historians--revealing summaries of regional literature and discussions of western stories yet to be told. Together these writings furnish readers with useful considerations of important subjects about the American West. All those interested in the American West and its interpreters will find these illuminative moments of literary history and historiography especially appealing.

A collection of new essays on notable historic and contemporary Basques of America's Far West that offers a perceptive and lively examination of the lives of one of the West's most resilient and successful ethnic minorities. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the Basque people or those interested in the process of immigration and assimilation: these profiles illustrate how America's Basque immigrants have achieved success in mainstream society while retaining strong ties to their ancient Old World culture.

Historians of the American West are indebted to the pioneering scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Frederick Jackson Turner, Walter Prescott Webb, and Herbert Eugene Bolton. Etulain gathers essays by contemporary historians on ten of these early writers to survey of the evolution of a scholarly field.

Like many Pacific Northwest sheep herders, Sebastian Etulain emigrated from Europe's Basque country. He arrived in Yakima in May of 1921, convinced that hard work could overcome a lack of formal education and other shortcomings. It became his doctrine, and he advanced to ranch owner before marrying Mary Gillard Foster.The Etulain sheep ranch lay among rock ridges, carved out coulees, rounded hills, and rich grasslands twenty miles east of Ritzville and almost seventy miles south of Spokane. Isolated and sprawling across nearly ten thousand acres, it included a sturdy ranch house surrounded by hay barns, a water pump house, corrals, and pens for sheep, goats, dogs, and pigs. The spread also had a milking parlor and creamery, as well as a blacksmith shop.The Etulains adopted seasonal rhythms. For about one third of the year, their own abundant pasture grasses provided sufficient fodder. In the summer they moved most of their animals up to mountains around St. Maries, Idaho, to feast on rich grasses there. But from November to March the sheep and cattle needed purchased feed, and plenty of it.Growing up on a sheep ranch afforded Sebastian's boys a magical upbringing with magnificent memories--despite the demanding work. In Boyhood Among the Woolies, his youngest son, Richard, reveals the family's story, a rare look at life on an early eastern Washington sheep ranch. He recounts endless chores related to supplying feed and water, lambing season, sheep shearing, keeping animals safe, and fighting one of the largest dangers--grass fires. He also describes family activities, relationships with hired staff, favorite dogs, brotherly pranks and shenanigans, schooling and church in Ritzville, Basque history, and more.

Richard W. Etulain examines the emergence of Pacific Northwest prose beginning in the early nineteenth century up to the present. The book provides an introductory overview to a vast subject through “illuminative moments” that illustrate major shifts in the literary history of the region. The book’s focus is on novels, histories, and other nonfiction works that trace Pacific Northwest prose in chronological order through three periods: the frontier, regional, and post-regional eras.Etulain provides extensive coverage of the writings of notable authors, including novelists Frederic Homer Balch and Mary Hallock Foote, offering an understanding of frontier romantic and Local Color Writers. He also explores the works of H. G. Merriam and novelist H. L. Davis, illustrating regional prose writings. Finally, Etulain includes a panoply of writers who exemplify an emphasis on gender, race and ethnicity, and environmental texts from the post-WWII period.Illuminative Moments in Pacific Northwest Prose delivers a first-time overview of the region’s literary contributions that will interest both scholars and general readers alike.

Basques of the American West: New and Collected Essays on History and Ethnicity brings together new and previously published work by Richard W. Etulain, blending historical analysis and literary criticism to explore the lives, stories, and representations of the Basques in this region. The essays examine key figures such as Robert Laxalt and Frank Bergon; survey historical studies, memoirs, and novels; and trace evolving interpretations of Basque identity in Western literature and scholarship. Etulain highlights major trends in both Basque and Western American historiography while identifying important topics that remain open for additional research. This collection offers readers a thoughtful and engaging look at the enduring presence and influence of Basques across the cultural and historical landscape of the American West.