Stanley Vestal – författare

"A tall man, with long black hair, smooth face, dark eyes (inclining to turn his head a little to one side, as much as to say, 'I can tell you about it'), a harum-scarum, don't-care sort of man, full of life and fun. That's how a contemporary described Joe Meek."Born in Virginia, Joe Meek became a trapper, Indian fighter, pioneer, peace officer, frontier politician, and lover of practical jokes and Jacksonian democracy. He was a boon companion to two other larger-than-life mountain men, Kit Carson and Jim Bridger, and just as important in frontier history.In 1829, our nineteen-year-old hero joined the Rocky Mountain Fur Company of Jedediah Smith and the Sublettes and headed west on an odyssey of hair-raising high adventure and hilarious low comedy. For the next twelve years, the Rockies rang with tales of Joe's wild exploits. After the Last Rendezvous in 1840, he helped drive the first wagons to Oregon, served in the legislature of the provisional government, and went to Washington as a special envoy to President Polk. He later returned to Oregon to live out his days in the community that he helped build.

Even among the mighty mountain men, Jim Bridger was a towering figure. He was one of the greatest explorers and pathfinders in American history. He couldn't write his name, but at eighteen he had braved the fury of the Missouri, ascending it in a keelboat flotilla commanded by that stalwart Mike Fink. By 1824, when he was only twenty, he had discovered the Great Salt Lake. Later he was to open the Overland Route, which was the path of the Overland Stage, the Pony Express, and the Union Pacific. One of the foremost trappers in the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, he was a legend in his own time as well as ours. He remains one of the most important scouts and guides in the history of the West.The Christian Science Monitor has called this biography "probably the fairest portrait of Jim Bridger in existence." The New York Times has praise for a "painstaking job of research among the usual Bridger sources and among some others which have been neglected. . . . [The author] has adequately set the scene for his hero's adventures and has honestly appraised the great guide's historical stature."Other Bison Books by Stanley Vestal: Dodge City: Queen of Cowtowns, Joe Meek: The Merry MOuntain Man; The Missouri, The Old Santa Fe Trail, and Warpath: The True Story of the Fighting Sioux Told in a Biography of Chief White Bull

Nephew to Sitting Bull, chief of the Sioux, Pte San Hunka (White Bull) was a famous warrior in his own right. He had been on the warpath against whites and other Indians for more than a decade when he fought the greatest battle of his life. On the afternoon of June 25, 1876, five troops of the U. S. Seventh Cavalry under the command of George Armstrong Custer rode into the valley of the Little Big Horn River, confidently expecting to rout the Indian encampments there. Instead, the cavalry met the gathered strength of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, who did not run as expected but turned the battle toward the soldiers. White Bull charged again and again, fighting until the last soldier was dead. The battle was Custer's Last Stand, and White Bull was later referred to as the warrior who killed Custer. In 1932 White Bull related his life story to Stanley Vestal, who corroborated the details, from other sources and prepared this biography. "All that I told him is straight and true," said White Bull. His story is a matchless account of the life of an Indian warrior.

Here is a story, in thinly disguised fictional form, of Plains Indians, especially a Cheyenne chief, Whirlwind - his manner of life, his beliefs, and particularly, his love of his son. The villain is a Mandan who is given refuge in the Cheyenne camp and then wreaks havoc with the lives of his hosts. He causes a battle with the Sioux, steals the chief's favorite wife, and slays the chief's young son. Whirlwind's revenge for the death of his beloved son provides a dramatic climax.Happy Hunting Grounds recaptures Cheyenne life on the plains. The battles, celebrations, and lifeways of the Indians - Sioux, Cheyennes, and Mandans - are accurately and graphically portrayed. This volume is illustrated with drawings and paintings by Frederick Weygold, reflecting his own long association with the Plains tribes.

If that is Long Hair, I am the one who killed him,"" White Bull, the young nephew of Sitting Bull, said when Bad Juice pointed out Custer's body immediately after the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Yet it was Sitting Bull who acquired the notoriety and was paraded in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show as ""the warrior who killed Custer."" But this new edition of Stanley Vestal's classic biography of the famous chief emphasizes that ""Sitting Bull's fame does not rest upon the death of Custer's five troops. Had he been twenty miles away shooting antelope that morning, he would still remain the greatest of the Sioux.""The stirring account of the death throes of a mighty nation and its leader is the story of the ""greatest of the Sioux"" and his struggle to keep his people free and united. The Sioux were formidable warriors, as attested to by men who fought against them, like General Anson Mills, who said, ""They were the best cavalry in the world; their like will never be seen again,"" but they were up against an overwhelming tide of soldiers, homesteaders, and bureaucrats. Sitting Bull fought long and hard and ""He was ... a statesman, one of the most farsighted we have had,"" but statesmanship could not prevail against such odds.This powerful biography of Sitting Bull is brought to a new generation of readers in h a new and expanded edition, for much new material had been added to the original edition (published in 1932) that could not be disclosed while the informants were still living. Sitting Bull is a moving account of the epic courage of one man in the face of his inevitable defeat as the last defender of his people's rights.

More than a century has passed since that winter morning in 1890 when the Indian police killed Sitting Bull and destroyed the power of his great Sioux Nation. Yet only recently were the facts about Sitting Bull and the Sioux being sifted from the fables that have grown up in the interim.In New Sources of Indian History, Stanley Vestal traced scores of historical threads, obtained firsthand, which helped reveal the fabric of Sioux life, warfare, and relations with the whites from 1850 to 1891. This miscellany brings together the many phases of existence the Sioux knew when buffalo still roamed the shores of the Missouri, cultural aspects they lost when Indian agencies and military posts replaced the council fire.More than a series of episodes hung on the thread of time, this book portrays a many-colored pattern of American Indian personalities - from Sitting Bull, the leader of a mighty warrior society, to Black Bull, the Indian trickster, who would have sold Sioux lands to whites by the pound. For readers of Vestal's Sitting Bull (1932) this volume presents proof of the facts set forth in that remarkable biography.

The Missouri was the river of Lewis and Clark, of Manuel Lisa, General Ashley, and other organizers of the fur trade; of such noted travelers as George Catlin, Henry R. Schoolcraft, and Prince Maximilian; of a host of adventurous steamboat captains; of explorers like Jedediah Smith, Kit Carson, and Frémont; of doughty hunters and trappers like Hugh Glass, Jim Bridger, and John Colter. Stanley Vestal's rollicking story of one of America's most fabled waterways presents western history on a grand scale, one that. according to the New York Times, "anyone remotely interested in the American West will read.""Vestal takes the Big Muddy as the central character in an intriguing story. . . . It is always readable, always informative."—Los Angeles Times