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Sagebrush Soldier is an account of military life during the Indian Wars in the late nineteenth-century West. Private William Earl Smith describes daily camp life, battle scenes, and the behavior of famous men - Ranald Mackenzie and George Crook - in public and private poses. His diary covers the war from the enlisted men's viewpoint, as he worries about what he will eat and how he will keep warm in freezing conditions, and how he will keep calm when bullied by the sergeant major, of whom he says he would give ""five years of my life to [have] walked up to him and smacked him in the nose.""To complete the picture of the Sioux War, and particularly the Powder River Expedition, Sherry Smith frames Private Smith's narrative with contemporary accounts written by other participants in these events. She assembles a balanced, comprehensive history by also incorporating the testimony of officers, their Indian scouts and allies, and their enemy, the Northern Cheyennes.In camp on Christmas Eve, 1876, Smith bought a can of peaches, which cost him two dollars, to share with his bunkmate. Meanwhile, he sees another man give ten dollars for a bottle of whiskey. His own words best convey the feelings of a young man far from home at Christmas: ""We had a regular Old Christmas Dinner, a little piece of fat bacon and hard tack and a half cup of coffee. You bet I thought of home now if ever I did. But fate was a gane me and I could not bee there. My Bunkey bought some candy and we ate it.""Christmas candy and thoughts of home; some things never change, as readers will learn in this picture of military life unique in its eloquent honesty.

The first book on the great American landscape painter to focus primarily on his work in Nevada, capturing the beauty of the American West, its open spaces and the developing landscape at the dawn of the modern era.This is the first comprehensive publication on the paintings, letters, photographs, and poetry made by Maynard Dixon (1875–1946) while he was in Nevada. This large, landscape format book accompanies a blockbuster exhibition on this colorful western painter and illustrator.Although Dixon’s contributions as an artist are widely recognized throughout the American West, this significant publication surveys nearly 180 artworks he created in Nevada, Lake Tahoe, and the Eastern Sierra from 1901 to 1944. Dixon first visited the state of Nevada nearly 125 years ago; and while much has changed during the past century, one can still explore many of the same remote locales depicted in these paintings or drive across the state beneath what many like to refer to as a cloud-filled, “Maynard Dixon sky.”Richly illustrated, including a wealth of privately owned paintings never before reproduced, the volume includes by texts by scholar Donald J. Hagerty on Dixon’s Nevada journeys, a significant essay on the art of the Boulder Dam (now Hoover Dam), and Dixon’s depictions of the workers who built the dam. The book has a 3-piece binding and gilded edges.

Cities, Sagebrush, and Solitude explores the transformation of the largest desert in North America, the Great Basin, into America’s last urban frontier. In recent decades Las Vegas, Reno, Salt Lake City, and Boise have become the anchors for sprawling metropolitan regions. This population explosion has been fueled by the maturing of Las Vegas as the nation’s entertainment capital, the rise of Reno as a magnet for multitudes of California expatriates, the development of Salt Lake City’s urban corridor along the Wasatch Range, and the growth of Boise’s celebrated high-tech economy and hip urban culture.The blooming of cities in a fragile desert region poses a host of environmental challenges. The policies required to manage their impact, however, often collide with an entrenched political culture that has long resisted cooperative or governmental effort. The alchemical mixture of three ingredients--cities, aridity, and a libertarian political outlook--makes the Great Basin a compelling place to study. This book addresses a pressing question: are large cities ultimately sustainable in such a fragile environment?

Sagebrush Homesteads tells of a childhood spent on some of the last semi-arid acres claimed by homesteaders in the Columbia Basin. Laura T. Lage (1896-1985) opens her tale in 1906 when, as a child of ten, she arrives with her parents to begin a new life near the fledgling town of Othello, Washington. Like their neighbors, who live less than a mile away in any direction, the Tice family invests far more in the shallow, thirsty, "blowdust" soil of Eastern Washington's Adams County than its precarious promise warrants.Although their life is hard and resources are scarce, Laura finds much to be thankful for and her attitude is decidedly cheerful--even optimistic. Soon, the 1909 completion of the Milwaukee Railroad's western division gives some of the failing farmers new reason to stay, and the region's young people find employment and hope in the Milwaukee's restaurant, roundhouse, and work gangs. But in 1914, Laura realizes she must leave her father's farm to get a decent education and make her own living.Lage penned her regional pioneer classic a half-century later, after she returned to the once-parched farm and observed sprouting crops irrigated by the new Columbia Basin Project. The visit inspired her to record her memories--a wealth of homestead lore, humor, and despair. This WSU Press edition is an unabridged reprint of the original 1967 text, and includes the 1999 introduction by the Othello Community Museum's Gladys C. Para.