Oklahoma Western Biographies – serie

This book chronicles the life and frontier career of Don Juan de Oñate, the first colonizer of the old Spanish Borderlands. Born in Zacatecas, Mexico, in the mid-sixteenth century, Don Juan was the prominent son of an aristocratic silver-mining family.In 1598, in his late forties, Oñate led a formidable expedition of settlers, with wagons and livestock, on an epic march northward to the upper Rio Grade Valley of New Mexico. There he established the first European settlement west of the Mississippi, launching a significant chapter in early American history.In his activities he displayed qualities typical of Spain's sixteenth-century men of action; in his career we find a summation of the motives, aspirations, intentions, strengths, and weaknesses of the Hispanic pioneers who settled the Borderlands.

Narcissa Whitman and her husband, Marcus, were pioneer missionaries to the Cayuse Indians in Oregon Territory.  Narcissa grew up in western New York State, her values and attitudes carefully shaped by her mother. Very much a child of the Second Great Awakening, she eagerly embraced the burgeoning evangelical missionary movement. Following her marriage to Marcus Whitman, she spent most of 1836 traveling overland with him to Oregon. Narcissa enthusiastically began service as a missionary there, hoping to see many ""benighted"" Indians adopt her message of salvation through Christ.But not one Indian ever did. Cultural barriers that Narcissa never grasped effectively kept her at arm's length from the Cayuse. Gradually abandoning her efforts with the Indians, Narcissa developed a more satisfying ministry. She taught and counseled whites on the mission compound, much as she had done in her own church circles in New York. Meanwhile, the growing number of eastern emigrants streaming into the territory posed an increasing threat to the Indians. The Cayuse ultimately took murderous action against the Whitmans, the most visible whites, thus ending dramatically Narcissa's eleven-year effort to be a faithful Christian missionary as well as a devoted wife and loving mother.In this moving biography, Julie Roy Jeffrey brings the controversial Narcissa Whitman to life, revealing not only white assumptions and imperatives but the perspective of the Cayuse tribe as well. Jeffrey draws on a rich assortment of primary and secondary materials, blending narration and interpretation in her account. She clearly traces the motivations and relationships, the opportunities and constraints that structured Narcissa Whitman's life as a nineteenth-century American evangelical woman.

The son of white captive Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah Parker rose from able warrior to tribal leader on the Comanche reservation. Between 1875 and his death in 1911, Quanah dealt with local Indian agents and with presidents and other high officials in Washington, facing the classic dilemma of a leader caught between the dictates of an occupying power and the wrenching physical and spiritual needs of his people. He maintained a remarkable blend of progressive and traditional beliefs, and contrary to government policy, he practiced polygamy and the peyote religion. In this crisp and readable biography, William T Hagan presents a well-balanced portrait of Quanah Parker, the chief, and Quanah, the man torn between two worlds.

Clad in the black robe of his priestly order and armed only with a crucifix, for more than a quarter of a century Father De Smet relentlessly tramped the American frontier to bring peace and religion to the tribes of the Pacific Northwest and the upper Missouri River country.In this biography, Robert Carriker describes De Smet's love for the great American West and the native tribes who lived there, the Potawatomis, Flatheads, Coeur d'Alenes, Kalispels, Blackfeet, Yankton Sioux, and others to whom the Jesuit father carried Christianity. Soon the man called Black Robe became known throughout the mountains and plains as a man of peace and a friend of all Indians.

Nearly a century after John Muir's death, his works remain in print, his name is familiar, and his thought is much with us. How Muir's life made him a leader and brought him insights destined to resonate for decades is the central question underlying this biography by Thurman Wilkins.Profoundly attached to dramatic wild places and plants, and to the Sierra and the redwoods in particular, Muir spearheaded efforts to protect forest areas and have some designated as national parks. Muir's wilderness ethic, as revealed in his books, letters, and journals, rests on his conception of the proper relationship between human culture and wild nature as one of humility and respect for all life.

In this volume, Michael P. Malone provides a succinct interpretive biography of James J. Hill, the ""Empire Builder""-so called for his work in developing the region of the United States between the Great Lakes and the Pacific Northwest.Malone explores Hill's complex life and personality, his activities and interests, and recreates both the story of the railroad race to the Pacific and the complex interactions involved in the development of the region.""Michael Malone has written a model. . . .interpretative biography of James J. Hill. He has drawn on the research of others, published and unpublished, as he says, but also on his own knowledge of American economic development in Hill's time as a leading historian of mining and of a state in whose development Hill's railroads were major factors."" -Earl Pomeroy, Professor of History, Retired, University of Oregon and University of California, San Diego

John Ford remains the most honored director in Hollywood history, having won six Academy Awards and four New York Film Critics Awards. Drawing upon extensive written and oral history, Ronald L. David explores Ford's career from his silent classic, The Iron Horse, through the transition to sound, and then into the pioneer years of location filming, the golden years of Hollywood, and the movement toward television. During his career, Ford made such classics as Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, and The Searchers-136 pictures in all, 54 of them Westerns. The complexity of his personality comes alive here through the eyes of his colleagues, friends, relatives, film critics, and the actors he worked with, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Maureen O'Hara, and Katharine Hepburn.

When farm worker and labor organizer César Chávez burst upon America's national scene in 1965, U.S. readers and viewers were witnessing the emergence of a new Mexican American, or Chicano, movement. This biography of Chávez by Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard A. Garcia is the first to approach Chávez's life-his courageous acts, his turning points, his many perceived personas-in the context of Chicano and American history. It reveals a shy, quiet man who was launched by events into a maelstrom of campesino strikes, religious fervor, and nonviolent battles for justice. Among his friends and supporters he counted Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and millions across America who rallied to his cause.In Griswold del Castillo and Garcia's biography, Chávez's life mirrors major events in Mexican American history: Mexican immigration during the 1920s; forced repatriation in the 1930s; segregation in public schools; Mexican American contributions during World War II; the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles; formation of Mexican American organizations to advance civil and political rights; the Chicano movement of the 1960s and early 1970s; the emergence of a conservative political backlash in the 1980s; and, finally, the ""new immigration"" in the 1990s. César Chávez was touched by all these events, and his story is both private and part of a collective experience.Ultimately the authors see Chávez's significance as moral. In an age notable for its confusion about-if not lack of moral values, César Chávez stands as proof that America still has people of rare courage and conviction who devote their lives to a righteous cause, to self sacrifice and nonviolent struggle against overwhelming odds. Chávez consistently respected all ethnic and religious groups, rejected materialism, and, above all, fought for justice. Griswold del Castillo and Garcia's biography tells the inspiring story of a man who lived a simple life and preached a simple guiding dictum: Si Se Puede-Yes, it can be done.

Seeking the Northwest Passage and the fabled like to Russia, Japan, and Cathay, Alexander Mackenzie drove himself and his men relentlessly, by canoe and portage, across the uncharted rivers, valleys, and mountains of North America. Mackenzie's 1789 journey to the Arctic Ocean and his arduous journey to the Pacific in 1793 predate the Lewis and Clark expedition. By the age of thirty-one Alexander Mackenzie had become the first man to cross North America from the northwestern hub of the interior trade, Lake Athabasca in present-day northern Alberta, to the Pacific Ocean. He had opened the continent to trade and exploration.Mackenzie was a man of enormous ego and overpowering ambition. He left Scotland in search of opportunity in the North American fur trade and achieved success through a combination of bold exploits, grim determination, and business acumen. Mackenzie returned to his homeland late in life to be knighted, marry, and live a more genteel life, leaving behind a Métis family in North America. His celebrated book Voyages from Montreal remains an enduring classic of world travel literature.In his research, Barry Gough traveled from Mackenzie's birthplace to his tomb and from Montreal to the Arctic Ocean and to the Pacific. He takes the reader along with Mackenzie on his hazardous travels and voyages, using contemporary accounts to bring to life the problems and perils faced by the young explorer. First Across the Continent reveals the international impact of Sir Alexander Mackenzie's expeditions and places him among the elite of New World explorers, illuminating his vital role in the history of the fur trade and the American West.

Albert B. Fall, interior secretary in the Harding administration, was the first American cabinet member sent to prison for a crime committed in office. In the Teapot Dome affair - the worst modern political scandal until Watergate - Fall leased two naval oil reserves, Wyoming's Teapot Dome and California's Elk Hills, to Harry F. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny and received payments of $404,000 from the two millionaire oilmen. Historian David Stratton pulls no punches as he sheds new light on western and national politics, conservation, and economic development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Tempest over Teapot Dome describes Fall's role in Harding's administration, his tribulations in court before going to prison in 1931, his freewheeling career in New Mexico politics, his lawyering for underdog ranchers in a bloody range war, his gut-fighting style as a U. S. senator who opposed Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy, and his strident activities as an expert on Latin American affairs, particularly U. S.-Mexican relations.Fall's belief in the unrestricted and immediate disposition of public lands was as typically western as his black, broad-brimmed Stetson hat and his love of fine horses.

Perhaps no Indian leader of the mid-nineteenth century was as well known in his time as the great Lakota Sioux Red Cloud. Although his fame later was eclipsed by that of the legendary heroes who crushed Custer's Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn-Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse-Red Cloud's active leadership of his people, and his representation of the Sioux in vital negotiations with the U.S. government, survived the demise of the other leaders by many years.Red Cloud was not born to leadership. He earned it. In his early years he gained a reputation for fierceness as a warrior and as a tactician against both whites and other Indian tribes. And in his middle years, his leadership against the U.S. Army in the Powder River country, his forcing the closure of the Bozeman Trail, and his strong pressure to negotiate the favorable outcome of the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868 made him the preeminent chief among the Sioux.In his later years, Red Cloud was an intermediary for his people in their dealings with the U.S. government. Although his motives at times were questioned, he steadfastly resisted encroachments on Sioux land during the reservation period, and he consistently protested the pressure by market oriented whites to impose an agrarian economy on a people who had never farmed. Red Cloud's passionate belief in the values of his culture prevented him from acting as a culture broker; nevertheless, he remained an important figure of the Gilded Age.Imbued with the new social and environmental historiography, this modern biography by Robert W. Larson is a valuable contribution to Sioux history and to our understanding of Indian-white relationships in the nineteenth century as well as political aspects of the Indian-white dialogue.

George Armstrong Custer. The name evokes instant recognition in almost every American and in people around the world. No figure in the history of the American West has more powerfully moved the human imagination.When originally published in 1988, Cavalier in Buckskin met with critical acclaim. Now Robert M. Utley has revised his best-selling biography of General George Armstrong Custer. In his preface to the revised edition, Utley writes about his summers (1947-1952) spent as a historical aide at the Custer Battlefield-as it was then known-and credits the work of several authors whose recent scholarship has illuminated our understanding of the events of Little Bighorn. He has revised or expanded chapters, added new information on sources, and revised the map of the battlefield.

Devoted wife and mother. Acclaimed novelist, illustrator, and interpreter of the American West. At a time when society expected women to concentrate on family and hearth, Mary Hallock Foote (1847-1938) published twelve novels, four short story collections, almost two dozen stories and essays, and innumerable illustrations. In Mary Hallock Foote, Darlis A. Willer examines the life of this gifted and spirited woman from the East as she adapted herself and her artistic vision to the West.Foote's images of the American West differed sharply from those offered by male artists and writers of the time. She depicted a more gentle West, a domestic West of families and settlements rather than a Wild West of soldiers, American Indians, and cowboys. Miller examines how Foote's career was molded by the East-West tensions she experienced throughout her adult life and by society's expectations of womanhood and motherhood.This biography recounts Foote's Quaker upbringing; her education at the School of Design for Women at Cooper Union, New York; her marriage to Arthur De Wint Foote, including his alcohol problems; her life in Boise, Idaho, and later Grass Valley, California; her grief over the early death of daughter Agnes Foote; and the previously unexplored last two decades of her life.Miller has made extensive use of every major archive of letters and documents by and about Foote. She sheds light on Foote's numerous stories, essays, and novels. And examines all pertinent sources on Foote's life and works.Anyone interested in the American West, women's history, or life histories in general will find Miller's biography of Mary Hallock Foote fascinating,

The daughter of Oklahoma sodbusters, a student of Edward Everett Dale, and a Protegee of Frederick Jackson Turner, Angie Debo was an unlikely forerunner of the New Western History. Breaking with the followers of Turner, Debo viewed the westward movement of European Americans as conquest rather than settlement. Her studies on the Five tribes presented the Native American point of view and incorporated ethnological insights more than a decade before ethnology emerged as a separate field.Shirley A. Leckie's biography of Debo is the first to assess the significance of Oklahoma's pioneering historian in the historiography of the American Indian, the writing of regional history, and the development of national law and court cases involving indigenous people. Leckie sheds light on Debo's family's background, her personality, and the impact of gender discrimination on her career. Finally, Leckie clarifies why Debo became a scholarly pioneer and, later, a ""warrior-scholar"" activist working on behalf of Native Americans during a period of changing Indian policy.

With a widowed mother and six siblings, Annie Oakley first became a trapper, hunter, and sharpshooter simply to put food on the table. Yet her genius with the gun eventually led to her stardom in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The archetypal western woman, Annie Oakley urged women to take up shooting to procure food, protect themselves, and enjoy healthy exercise, yet she was also the proper Victorian lady, demurely dressed and skeptical about the value of women's suffrage. Glenda Riley presents the first interpretive biography of the complex woman who was Annie Oakley.

In 1922, the teenage son of a Jewish immigrant ventured from Manhattan to New Mexico for his health. It was the first of many trips to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a western retreat where J. Robert Oppenheimer would eventually hold pathbreaking discussions with world-renowned scientists about atomic physics. Oppenheimer came to feel at home in the American West, and while extensive studies have been made of the man, this is the first book to explicitly link him with the region. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Cold War, and the Atomic West explores how the West influenced Oppenheimer as a scientist and as a person - and the role he played in influencing it.Jon Hunner's concise account of Oppenheimer's life and the emergence of an Atomic West distills a vast literature for students and general readers. In this brisk, engaging biography, the author recounts how Oppenheimer helped locate the atomic weapons research lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and helped establish leading physics departments at the University of California-Berkeley and Caltech. By taking part in moving atomic physics west of the Mississippi, Oppenheimer bolstered the establishment of research labs, uranium mines, nuclear reactors, and more, bringing talented people - and billions of dollars in federal contracts - to the region.Interwoven into this atomic tale are insights into the physicist's troubled growing-up years, his marriage and family life, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Oppenheimer's eventual downfall. After the first atomic bomb burst over the New Mexican desert in 1945 and as the Cold War developed, the American myth of the Wild West expanded to encompass atomic sheriffs saving the world for democracy - even as powerful opponents began questioning Oppenheimer's place in that story. Against the backdrop of the physicist's life twining with the region's history, Hunner explores the promise and peril of the Atomic Age.

Born in a farmhouse in the Texas Hill Country, Lyndon Baines Johnson brought a western sensibility to the White House. Building on recent studies that have delved into Johnson's Texas roots, Kevin J. Fernlund has written a brief, lively biography of the thirty-sixth president that better shows how his home state molded his early years - and how the one-time Houston schoolteacher eventually became a Texas tornado twisting across the state's and soon the nation's political landscape.Lyndon B. Johnson and Modern America offers a concise look at LBJ that shows how his career coincided with the ascendancy of American liberalism within a Cold War context. In particular, Fernlund extends recent observations regarding Johnson's important role in regional transformation at a time when the South and West became full partners in the American economy. In examining LBJ's promotion of the space program and his disastrous decision to escalate the war in Vietnam, Fernlund shows how these and other Johnson administration policies affected the American West. He describes how Johnson's liberal agenda for the West became subverted by illiberal wars with enemies foreign and domestic, exposing the limits of liberalism and fostering the region's nascent conservatism. He also compares Johnson's commitment to social justice with that of his arch nemesis Ho Chi Minh, providing new insight for readers and an intriguing springboard for classroom discussion.Although subsequent presidents also hailed from the West, Fernlund argues that Johnson was our last truly western chief executive. This new approach to LBJ offers a novel reading of an important Texan, his huge circles of influence, and his lasting impact on the American scene.

Agnes Morley Cleaveland found lasting fame after publishing her memoir, No Life for a Lady, in 1941. Her account of growing up on a cattle ranch in west-central New Mexico captivated readers from coast to coast, and it remains in print to this day. In her book, Cleaveland memorably portrayed herself and other ranchwomen as capable workers and independent thinkers. Her life, however, was not limited to the ranch. In Open Range, Darlis A. Miller expands our understanding of Cleaveland's significance, showing how a young girl who was a fearless risk-taker grew up to be a prolific author and well-known social activist.Following a hardscrabble childhood in remote regions of northern and central New Mexico, and then many years of rigorous education, Agnes Morley married Newton Cleaveland in 1899. The couple took up primary residence in Berkeley, California, where Agnes lived another kind of life as clubwoman and activist. Yet Agnes's ranch in the Datil Mountains always drew her back to New Mexico and provided the raw material for her writing.Seen as a whole, Cleaveland's life story spans the years from territorial New Mexico to the Cold War, includes the raising of her four children and interactions with a wide range of national and regional characters, and provides insight into such aspects of western culture as railroads, cattle, and tourism. Her biography is a case study in the roles that wealthy and well-educated women played during the first half of the twentieth century in both domestic and political spheres and will intrigue anyone familiar with the writings of this multifaceted woman.

Charles Goodnight was a pioneer of the early range cattle industry - an opinionated and profane but energetic and well-liked rancher.Goodnight's story is now re-examined by William T. Hagan in this brief, authoritative account that considers the role of ranching in general - and Goodnight in particular - in the development of the Texas Panhandle. The first major reassessment of his life in seventy years, Charles Goodnight: Father of the Texas Panhandle traces its subject's life from hardscrabble farmer to cattle baron, giving close attention to lesser-known aspects of his last thirty years.Goodnight came up in the days when much of Texas was free range and open to occupancy by any cattleman brave enough to stake a claim. Hagan shows how Goodnight learned the cattle business and became one of the most famous ranchers of the Southwest. Hagan also presents a clearer picture than ever before of Goodnight's business arrangements and investments, including the financial setbacks of his later life.As entertaining as it is informative, Hagan's account takes readers back to the Palo Duro Canyon and the Staked Plains to share insights into the cattleman's life - riding the range, fighting grass fires, driving cattle to the nearest railhead - the very stuff of cowboy legend and lore. This fascinating biography enriches our understanding of a Texas icon.

Mountain man and fur trader Jedediah Smith casts a heroic shadow. He was the first Anglo-American to travel overland to California via the Southwest, and he roamed through more of the West than anyone else of his era. His adventures quickly became the stuff of legend. Using new information and sifting fact from folklore, Barton H. Barbour now offers a fresh look at this dynamic figure.Barbour tells how a youthful Smith was influenced by notable men who were his family's neighbors, including a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. When he was twenty-three, hard times leavened with wanderlust set him on the road west. Barbour delves into Smith's journals to a greater extent than previous scholars and teases out compelling insights into the trader's itineraries and personality. Use of an important letter Smith wrote late in life deepens the author's perspective on the legendary trapper. Through Smith's own voice, this larger-than-life hero is shown to be a man concerned with business obligations and his comrades' welfare, and even a person who yearned for his childhood. Barbour also takes a hard look at Smith's views of American Indians, Mexicans in California, and Hudson's Bay Company competitors and evaluates his dealings with these groups in the fur trade.Dozens of monuments commemorate Smith today. This readable book is another, giving modern readers new insight into the character and remarkable achievements of one of the West's most complex characters.

History has portrayed Christopher ""Kit"" Carson in black and white. Best known as a nineteenth-century frontier hero, he has been represented more recently as an Indian killer responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Navajos. Biographer David Remley counters these polarized views, finding Carson to be less than a mythical hero, but more than a simpleminded rascal with a rifle.Kit Carson: The Life of an American Border Man strikes a balance between prevailing notions about this quintessential western figure. Whereas the dime novelists exploited Carson's popular reputation, Remley reveals that the real man was dependable, ethical, and - for his day - relatively open-minded. Sifting through the extensive scholarship about Kit, the author illuminates the key dimensions of Carson's life, including his often neglected Scots-Irish heritage. His people's dire poverty and restlessness, their clannish rural life and sternly Protestant character, committed Carson, like his Scots-Irish ancestors, to loyalty and duty and to following his leader into battle without question.Remley also places Carson in the context of his times by exploring his controversial relations with American Indians. Although despised for the merciless warfare he led on General James H. Carleton's behalf against the Navajos, Carson lived amicably among many Indian people, including the Utes, whom he served as U.S. government agent. Happily married to Waa-Nibe, an Arapaho woman, until her death, he formed a lasting friendship with their daughter, Adaline.Remley sees Carson as a complicated man struggling to master life on America's borders, those highly unstable areas where people of different races, cultures, and languages met, mixed, and fought, sometimes against each other, sometimes together, for the possession of home, hunting rights, and honor.

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.

Bret Harte was the best-known and highest-paid writer in America in the early 1870s, yet his vexed attempts to earn a living by his pen led to the failure of his marriage and, in 1878, his departure for Europe. Gary Scharnhorst's biography of Harte traces the growing commercial appeal of western fiction and drama on both sides of the Atlantic during the Gilded Age, a development in which Harte played a crucial role.Harte's pioneering use of California local color in such stories as ""The Outcasts of Poker Flat"" challenged genteel assumptions about western writing and helped open eastern papers to contributions by Mark Twain and others. The popularity of Bret Harte's writings was driven largely by a literary market that his western stories helped create.The first Harte biography in nearly seventy years to be written entirely from primary sources, this book documents Harte's personal relationships and, in addition, his negotiations with various publishers, agents, and theatrical producers as he exploited popular interest in the American West.

A steadfast champion of his people during the wars with encroaching Anglo-Americans, the Apache chief Victorio deserves as much attention as his better-known contemporaries Cochise and Geronimo. In presenting the story of this nineteenth-century Warm Springs Apache warrior, Kathleen P. Chamberlain expands our understanding of Victorio's role in the Apache wars and brings him into the center of events.Although there is little documentation of Victorio's life outside military records, Chamberlain draws on ethnographic sources to surmise his childhood and adolescence and to depict traditional Warm Springs Apache social, religious, and economic life. Reconstructing Victorio's life beyond the military conflicts that have since come to define him, she interprets his character and actions not only as whites viewed them but also as the logical outcome of his upbringing and worldview.Chamberlain's Victorio is a pragmatic leader and a profoundly spiritual man. Caught in the absurdities of post-Civil War Indian policy, Victorio struggled with the glaring disconnect between the U.S. government's vision for Indians and their own physical, psychological, and spiritual needs.Graced with historic photos of Victorio, other Apaches, and U.S. military leaders, this biography portrays Victorio as a leader who sought a peaceful homeland for his people in the face of wrongheaded decisions from Washington. It is the most nearly complete and balanced picture yet to emerge of a Native leader caught in the conflicts and compromises of the nineteenth-century Southwest.

As president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Utah's first territorial governor, Brigham Young (1801-77) shaped a religion, a migration, and the American West. He led the Saints to Utah, guided the establishment of 350 settlements, and inspired the Mormons as they weathered unimaginable trials and hardships. Although he generally succeeded, some decisions, especially those regarding the Mormon Reformation and the Black Hawk War, were less than sound. In this new biography, historian Thomas G. Alexander draws on a lifetime of research to provide an evenhanded view of Young and his leadership.Following the murder in 1844 of church founder Joseph Smith, Young bore a heavy responsibility: ensuring the survival and expansion of the church and its people. Alexander focuses on Young's leadership, his financial dealings, his relations with non-Mormons, his families, and his own deep religious conviction. Brigham Young and the Expansion of the Mormon Faith addresses such controversial issues as the practice of polygamy (Young himself had fifty-five wives), relations and conflicts between Mormons and Indians, and the circumstances and aftermath of the horrific events of Mountain Meadows in 1857. Although Young might have done better, Alexander argues that he bore no direct responsibility for the tragedy.Young relied on the counsel of his associates, and at times, the Mormon people pushed back to prevent him from implementing changes. In some cases, such as polygamy and the doctrine of blood atonement, the church leadership eventually rejected his views. Yet on the whole, Brigham Young emerges as a multifaceted human figure, and as a prophet revered by millions of LDS members, an inspired leader who successfully led his people to a distant land where their community expanded and flourished.

In 1922, the teenage son of a Jewish immigrant ventured from Manhattan to New Mexico for his health. It was the first of many trips to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a western retreat where J. Robert Oppenheimer would eventually hold pathbreaking discussions with world-renowned scientists about atomic physics. Oppenheimer came to feel at home in the American West, and while extensive studies have been made of the man, this is the first book to explicitly link him with the region. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Cold War, and the Atomic West explores how the West influenced Oppenheimer as a scientist and as a person - and the role he played in influencing it.Jon Hunner's concise account of Oppenheimer's life and the emergence of an Atomic West distills a vast literature for students and general readers. In this brisk, engaging biography, the author recounts how Oppenheimer helped locate the atomic weapons research lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and helped establish leading physics departments at the University of California-Berkeley and Caltech. By taking part in moving atomic physics west of the Mississippi, Oppenheimer bolstered the establishment of research labs, uranium mines, nuclear reactors, and more, bringing talented people - and billions of dollars in federal contracts - to the region.Interwoven into this atomic tale are insights into the physicist's troubled growing-up years, his marriage and family life, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Oppenheimer's eventual downfall. After the first atomic bomb burst over the New Mexican desert in 1945 and as the Cold War developed, the American myth of the Wild West expanded to encompass atomic sheriffs saving the world for democracy - even as powerful opponents began questioning Oppenheimer's place in that story. Against the backdrop of the physicist's life twining with the region's history, Hunner explores the promise and peril of the Atomic Age.

Born in a farmhouse in the Texas Hill Country, Lyndon Baines Johnson brought a western sensibility to the White House. Building on recent studies that have delved into Johnson's Texas roots, Kevin J. Fernlund has written a brief, lively biography of the thirty-sixth president that better shows how his home state molded his early years - and how the one-time Houston schoolteacher eventually became a Texas tornado twisting across the state's and soon the nation's political landscape.Lyndon B. Johnson and Modern America offers a concise look at LBJ that shows how his career coincided with the ascendancy of American liberalism within a Cold War context. In particular, Fernlund extends recent observations regarding Johnson's important role in regional transformation at a time when the South and West became full partners in the American economy. In examining LBJ's promotion of the space program and his disastrous decision to escalate the war in Vietnam, Fernlund shows how these and other Johnson administration policies affected the American West. He describes how Johnson's liberal agenda for the West became subverted by illiberal wars with enemies foreign and domestic, exposing the limits of liberalism and fostering the region's nascent conservatism. He also compares Johnson's commitment to social justice with that of his arch nemesis Ho Chi Minh, providing new insight for readers and an intriguing springboard for classroom discussion.Although subsequent presidents also hailed from the West, Fernlund argues that Johnson was our last truly western chief executive. This new approach to LBJ offers a novel reading of an important Texan, his huge circles of influence, and his lasting impact on the American scene.

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.

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.