Western Frontier Library Series – serie

In 1872, Isabella Bird, daughter of a clergyman, set off alone to the Antipodes 'in search of health' and found she had embarked on a life of adventurous travel. In 1873, wearing Hawaiian riding dress, she rode her horse through the American Wild West, a terrain only newly opened to pioneer settlement. The letters that make up this volume were first published in 1879. They tell of magnificent, unspoiled landscapes and abundant wildlife, of encounters with rattlesnakes, wolves, pumas and grizzly bears, and her reactions to the volatile passions of the miners and pioneer settlers. A classic account of a truly astounding journey.

In the bright morning of his youth Lewis H. Garrard traveled into the wild and free Rocky Mountain West and left us this fresh and vigorous account, which, says A. B. Guthrie, Jr., contains in its pages ""the genuine article-the Indian, the trader, the mountain man, their dress, and behavior and speech and the country and climate they lived in.""On September 1, 1846, Garrard, then only seventeen years old, left Westport Landing (now Kansas City) with a caravan under the command of the famous trader Céran St. Vrain, bound for Bent's Fort (Fort William) in the southeastern part of present-day Colorado. After a lengthy visit at the fort and in a camp of the Cheyenne Indians, early in 1847 he joined the little band of volunteers recruited by William Bent to avenge the death of his brother, Governor Charles Bent of Taos, killed in a bloody but brief Mexican and Indian uprising in that New Mexican pueblo. In fact, Garrard's is the only eyewitness account we have of the trial and hanging of the ""revolutionaries"" at Taos.Many notable figures of the plains and mountains dot his pages: traders St. Vrain and the Bents; mountain men John L. Hatcher, Jim Beckwourth, Lucien B. Maxwell, Kit Carson, and others; various soldiery traveling to and from the outposts of the Mexican War; and explorer and writer George F. Ruxton.

On November 20, 1903, Tom Horn was hanged in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for the murder of a fourteen-year-old nester boy. Horn-army scout and interpreter for Generals Willcox, Crook, and Miles in the Apache wars, Pinkerton operative, cattle detective, and ""King of Cowboys""-was hanged like a common criminal, many think mistakenly.His own account of his life, written while he was in prison and first published in 1904, is not really a vindication, says Dean Krakel in his introduction. ""While the appendix is spiked with interesting letters, testimonials, and transcripts, they don't really add up to anything in the way of an explanation of what really happened.""Regardless of Horn's guilt or innocence, his story, beginning when he was a runaway Missouri farm boy, provides a firsthand look at scout Al Sieber in action, at the military both great and small, at the wily Geronimo, the renegade Natchez, and old Chief Nana of the Apaches.

Thomas Edgar Crawford - variously known as ""The Texas Kid,"" ""The Montana Kid,"" ""Buckskin,"" ""Kid,"" and ""Ed"" - teamed up early with such notorious characters as Black Jack Ketchum and Henry Starr. Later Crawford took up ranching in Montana and lived to tell about the war between the cattlemen and sheepmen. He tried gold mining in California, but was soon forced to sell his holdings in order to avoid financial catastrophe.Here, published for the first time, are Crawford's recollections of life in the West from 1881 to 1910, dictated when he was past seventy years old, not long before his death in 1941. His story constitutes an amazing record of the activities of outlaw gangs of his time and provides new material about the Jackson Hole and Hole in the Wall outlaws - although Crawford was reluctant to reveal the role he played in their affairs.Crawford could understand a train or bank robber, but more than once he took the trail after a horse thief. He liked horses and intensely disliked sheep, but even so, he often opened his home as a refuge to sheepherders to save them from freezing to death in a blizzard. He loved to hunt, and some of his best tales concern adventures in search of game.The West of the Texas Kid is one man's account of the West as he knew it. Here, Thomas Edgar Crawford has helped preserve the lore and legends of the Old West.

The honeymoon of Elizabeth Bacon and George Armstrong Custer was interrupted in 1864 by his call to duty with the Army of the Potomac. She begged to be allowed to go along, thus setting the pattern of her future life. From that time on, she accompanied General Custer on all of his major assignments, aside from the summer Indian campaigns - ""the only woman,"" she said, ""who always rode with the regiment.""Her story, told by herself, is an absorbing adventure. Moreover, there is a added bonus - a gentle, loving portrait of George Armstrong Custer, husband and man, by the person who knew him best, his wife. Her absolute devotion to him is revealed in every line of her account, which ends, appropriately enough, with the day on which she received the news of the disaster at the Little Big Horn.

Of all firsthand accounts of lawlessness in the old Southwest, none is more fascinating than Pat F. Garrett's The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid. First published in 1882, a year after Sheriff Garrett killed the Kid, ""the bravest and most feared' gunman of the Lincoln County, New Mexico, cattle war, it is at once the most authoritative biography of William H. Bonney and the foundation of the Billy the Kid legend.

In 1894, when A. S. Mercer published this angry eyewitness account of the cattlemen's invasion of Wyoming, the book was so thoroughly and ruthlessly suppressed that few copies of that edition remain today.Although historians have since questioned some of Mercer's conclusions about the Johnson County range war, they have never controverted the facts of the cattlemen-homesteader struggle as he grimly reported them. With the intention of ""executing"" alleged rustlers and terrorizing the homesteaders, a band of fifty-two cattlemen and hired gunmen invaded Johnson Country, Wyoming, in April 1892. After besieging and killing ""the bravest man in Johnson County,"" the raiders in turn found themselves besieged by the homesteaders and finally in the protective custody of the Untied States cavalry. Further legal and illegal maneuvering permitted the invaders to go unpunished, but the cattlemen never again attempted to retain their hold over the range with organized mob violence.In this new edition of The Banditti of the Plains the original text has been followed with the utmost fidelity, even including the illustrations. An informed and interesting foreword by William H. Kittrell has been added to the book.

When General Custer led his troops to annihilation in the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, he was possibly the most notorious Indian fighter the army had known. In his own time, he achieved much of his fame as a daring soldier through his own published accounts of his adventures. Indeed, in My Life on the Plains, originally published serially in the Galaxy magazine starting in May 1872, Custer displays the flamboyance and glamour generally attributed to him by others.Covering the years 1867-69, the period of most extensive military activity against the Plains Indians, Custer's book tells of the newly reorganized Seventh Cavalry's operations on the frontier. When published, it aroused fresh controversy over the Battle of the Washita during the Winter Campaign of 1868. In fact, Custer so vigorously denounced the ""humanitarians"" espousing the ""Indian peace policy"" that one of those named by him - General W. B. Hazen - defended his reputation in a pamphlet issued in 1874. Hazen's rebuttal, entitled ""Corrections of Life on the Plains,"" is appended to this volume.

The Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition in 1876 was successful in scattering the united and victorious Indians of the Custer massacre. Commanded by General George Crook and covering eight hundred miles in ten weeks, the campaign was a hard one on Indians and soldiers alike. Before it ended, many of the cavalrymen were walking - their horses had either died or were killed for food. The Indians had their problems, too. The earlier Rosebud and Custer fights had expended much of their ammunition, their own scorched-earth tactics had destroyed much of their grazing land, and they were pressed so hard by Crook they had little opportunity to hunt.The story of the campaign is vividly told by Charles King, adjutant of General Merritt's Fifth Cavalry. A fine companion volume to newsman John F. Finerty's War-Path and Bivouac (Norman, 1961), King's account presents the soldier's point of view. It also covers the activities of the fifth Cavalry before joining Crook's force, including the fight on the War Bonnet, which succeeded in turning a large group of Cheyennes back to the Red Cloud Agency and prevented their joining Sitting Bull. It was on the War Bonnet that King witnessed Buffalo Bill Cody's famous fight with Yellow Hand, which he recounts in detail.King's book, first published in 1880, presents an articulate and detailed picture of the dangers and privations of Indian campaigning at its toughest.

The tainted sheriff in this narrative is Henry Plummer, who arrived in Nevada City, a gold camp in California's high Sierra, in 1852 and soon had two murders to his credit-both the results of bawdy-house brawls. Ten years later he was a full-fledged villain directing a gang of criminals. In 1863 Plummer moved into the Territory of Idaho, which included present-day Montana, and was elected sheriff despite his doubtful past. But it was there that he ran afoul of the vigilantes, and the story of the chase, capture, trial, and execution of Henry Plummer's road agents surpasses the wildest imagination of any Hollywood writer.

Taking his title, Pasó Por Aquí, from Juan de Oñate's carving in the living rock of El Morro, New Mexico, Eugene Manlove Rhodes created his own memorial to the decent people of his world who had ""passed this way"" without fanfare.Rhodes wrote about them with wit, gusto, and tenderness, with honesty, clarity, and a sureness of interpretation as yet unequaled. He captured for all time the free, lonely, self-reliant, skilled, eternally optimistic essence of his West.Rhodes himself rode a brindle steer, fleeing from an irate sheriff, as his story hero McEwen does, and Rhodes made seven miles on his bovine mount before the beast ""sulled"" on him. Rhodes was also a volunteer nurse in a diphtheria pest house when El Garrotillo (the strangler) was the most feared disease in the isolated West.Pat Garrett appears here under his own name and in a favorable light - Rhodes's way of rebutting what he considered unfair disparagement of Garrett by other writers. The story was filmed in 1948 as Four Faces West, starring Joel McCrea in the lead and Charles Bickford as Pat Garrett.Eugene Manlove Rhodes was one of the great writers of the Western, and this is his most anthologized story. Students of western history and American literature, and everyone who loves tales of the Old West will enjoy this Rhodes classic.

Among the famous ranch brands of Texas are the T Anchor, JA, Diamond Tail, 777, Bar C, and XIT. And the greatest of these was XIT - The XIT Ranch of Texas.It was not the first ranch in West Texas, but after its formation in the eighteen-eighties it became the largest single operation in the cow country of the Old West and covered more than three million acres, all fenced.The state of Texas patented this huge rectangle of land, at the time considered by many to be part of ""the great American desert,"" to the Capitol Freehold Land and Investment Company of Chicago, in exchange for funds to erect the state capitol building in Austin. This ""desert"" became a legend in the cattle business, and it remains today a memory to thousands who recall the era when mustangs and longhorns grazed beneath the brand of the XIT.The development and operation of this pastoral enterprise and its relation to the history of Texas is the subject of this great and widely discussed book by J. Evetts Haley, now made available to readers every· where. It is the story of a wild prairie, roamed by Indians, buffalo, mustangs, and antelope, that became a country of railroads, oil fields, prosperous farms, and carefully bred herds of cattle. The XIT Ranch of Texas is the epic account of a ranching operation about which many know a little but only a few very much. It is the one volume that, more than any other, portrays the early-day cattle business of the West.

In 1854, a Cherokee Indian called Yellow Bird (better known as John Rollin Ridge) launched in this book the myth of Joaquin Murieta, based on the California criminal career of a 19th century Mexican bandit. Today this folk hero has been written into state histories, sensationalized in books, poems, and articles throughout America, Spain, France, Chile, and Mexico, and made into a motion picture. The Ridge account is here reproduced from the only known copy of the first edition, owned by Thomas W. Streeter, of Morristown, New Jersey. According to it, the passionate, wronged Murieta organized an outlaw company numbering over 2,000 men, who for two years terrorized gold-rush Californians by kidnapping, bank robberies, cattle thefts, and murders. So bloodthirsty as to be considered five men, Joaquin was aided by several hardy subordinates, including the sadistic cutthroat, ""Three-Fingered Jack."" Finally, the state legislature authorized organization of the Mounted Rangers to capture the outlaws. The drama is fittingly climaxed by the ensuing chase, ""good, gory"" battle, and the shocking fate of the badmen.

In 1832, Washington Irving, recently returned from seventeen years' residence abroad and eager to explore his own country, embarked on an expedition to the country west of Arkansas set aside for the Indians. A Tour on the Prairies is his absorbing account of that journey, which extended from Fort Gibson to the Cross Timbers in what is now Oklahoma. First published in 1835, it has remained a perennial favorite, retaining its original freshness, vigor, and vividness to this day.

Before Dallas Stoudenmire accepted the position as marshal of El Paso, there existed no authority except that of the six-shooter, and very little precedent for a peace officer to follow. No one before had held the job for more than a couple of months. Yet, within two years, with the help of Jim Gillett, his young deputy, Stoudenmire had cleaned up the town, a task that earned him many enemies and, in the end, death.This is the story of Dallas Stoudenmire-auburn-haired, fiery-eyed, six-foot, two-inch gunfighter, container of laughter, liquor, and death-during the two tumultuous years in the early 1880's when he served as almost the only law north of the Rio Grande and west of Fort Worth.

When Abbie Morgan arrived with her husband Ed in the Alaskan village of Kulukak in 1931 to teach school, many of the Eskimos had never before seen a white woman. Kulukak could be reached by boat when the approach was not frozen over and by dogsled when ice made travel by boat impossible. Arctic Schoolteacher is the story of Abbie's Alaskan experience, from the detailed planning necessary for taking a year's worth of provisions to an isolated village to her departure from Alaska in 1933. In colorful, descriptive prose, she tells of the difficulty of travel and communication in the Far North, the magnificent physical environment, and the children to whom she devoted her time.

From the time of her husband's death at the Battle of the Little Big Horn until her own death fifty-seven years later, at the age of ninety, Mrs. George Armstrong Custer devoted herself to defending or embellishing her husband's reputation.This account, the second in Elizabeth's trilogy of her life with the General, focuses on the period immediately following the Civil War, when the Custers were stationed in Louisiana, Texas, and Kansas. She portrays the aftermath of the Civil War in Texas and life in Kansas while her husband took part in General Winfield Hancock's 1867 expedition against the Indians between the Arkansas and Platte rivers. Throughout, she provides detailed descriptions of an army officer's home life on the frontier during this major period of Indian unrest.This edition, an abridgment of the original 1887 edition, with an Introduction by Jane R. Stewart and a Foreword by Shirley A. Leckie, brings together in a single volume one of the most significant documents of the Old West, here made accessible to a new generation of readers.

First published in 1889, H. H. McConnell's Five Years a Cavalryman remains one of the best accounts of what it was like to be an ordinary cavalryman on the post-Civil War frontier. Posted for five years (1866-1871) with the Sixth U.S. Cavalry at Fort Belknap and Fort Richardson, in West Texas, McConnell gives the unglorified inside story on his fellow enlisted men and the officers, reporting candidly on their heavy drinking, their general disorganization, their boredom, and their thievery.Regarding the Texas Rangers, he admits that they might be tolerable Indian fighters, but in frontier towns, where they would engage in ""shooting scrapes and rows"" with its citizens and soldiers, they were more a threat to peace than keepers of the same. His tolerant attitude toward Native Americans is evident in his coverage of the arrest and trial of Satanta, Big Tree, and other Kiowas at Fort Sill, in which he grants that General William Sherman's concurrent visit to the post negatively affected their trial.In the foreword to this edition, William H. Leckie summarizes McConnell's frontier career and discusses his attitude toward the Tenth Calvary ""buffalo soldiers,"" the Texas Rangers, and officers such as Colonel Ranald MacKenzie.H. H. McConnell settled in Jacksboro, Texas (where Fort Richardson is located), and became a prominent citizen after his service in the U.S. cavalry. William H. Leckie, who wrote the Foreword, is the author of The Buffalo Soldiers, also published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

At the age of 79 Collinson began writing and this work is a collection of letters, articles and transcriptions of his conversations about the Old West. Collinson tells of the last days of Buffalo hunting on the Plains, the clashes of hunters, cowboys and Indians, and the nature of violence.

Girl on a Pony is the gritty, humorous, unflinchingly courageous story of five children growing up on a cattle ranch in the remote Valley of the Dry Cimarron in northeastern New Mexico near the little border town of Kenton, Oklahoma. Narrated years later by the oldest daughter, LaVerne, it is a vivid and authentic portrait of ranching life between the two world wars, from 1925, when the family moved to the Goodson Ranch from a half-dugout claim shack in Colorado, to 1936, when they began to disperse.During those years, people in the region endured blizzards, sick and maddened animals, drought, the Dust Bowl, and the Great Depression-with stoic good humor. In Girl on a Pony, cowboys go about their daily tasks, teaching the children all they know. Women endure the hardships of life in an isolated area, coping with the brutal labor ranch life requires of them, and maintaining touches of beauty and civilization where they can-creating lawns from relentlessly rocky soil, holding dances for their children, and painstakingly tatting when all else fails.

History has its heroes and its villains, but most of all it has its witnesses. As post chaplain at Fort D. A. Russell in Wyoming Territory from 1867 to 1870, the Reverend Edmund B. Tuttle was an eyewitness to the evolving relationship between the U.S. Army and American Indians on the northern high plains, particularly the Lakota (Sioux), the Northern Cheyennes, and the Northern Arapahos. In 1873, he wrote about his experiences, along with events derived from other sources.Tuttle knew many of the individuals involved in the various Indian-Anglo conflicts during the 1860s. His writings and interpretations furnish important information about the military occupation of the Bozeman Trail and about the Fort Laramie ""massacre"" of 1866, when Sioux, Cheyennes, and Arapahos wiped out Captain William J. Fetterman and his command. Tuttle's book also includes more peaceful events, such as Oglala Sioux chief Red Cloud's visit to Washington and New York City and the 1868 negotiations at Fort Phil Kearney. In some cases, Tuttle presents transcriptions of American Indian testimony given at the various meetings between Indian leaders and government officials. Jerome A. Greene's foreword sets Tuttle's writings in historical context.

A faithful and unvarnished Record of a Settler's Life"" is how Isabel Randall described her letters when they were first published in 1887. Many foreign travelers published accounts of their visits to the American West, but Randall was one of the few European women to write about the western experience from the inside.In 1884 Randall and her husband settled on a ranch in Montana hoping to make their fortune in the livestock boom. Randall's letters home to England describe the practical affairs of daily life, rural social interactions, and the natural world around her. Her letters are cheerful, but they also suggest why the Randalls ultimately failed to achieve financial success.In this new edition of A Lady's Ranch Life in Montana, Richard L. Saunders supplements Randall's letters with notes and an extensive introduction drawn from a wealth of primary sources. He sketches the Randalls' lives before and after their western adventure, describes the stock industry that drew them to Montana, places Isabel's letters in the context of English attitudes toward Americans, and discusses her neighbors' reactions to her criticisms of local society.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt's agriculture secretary and vice-president, Henry A. Wallace, had completed his junior year at Iowa State College in 1909, his family sent him on a western tour ""in search of the Corn Belt farmer."" Young Henry was to report to the family journal, Wallace's Farmer, how former Corn Belt farmers were prospering in the districts newly irrigated under public or private auspices, such as Arizona's Salt River, Idaho's Boise-Payette and Twin Falls, and farms on the Arkansas River near Garden City, Kansas.Wallace's articles, collected and reprinted here for the first time, are lively descriptions of up-and-coming western locales such as Amarillo, Texas; Phoenix, Arizona; the orange groves of southern California; the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys; and the Greeley District of Colorado. Along the way, the young reporter and agriculturist critiqued dry farming in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and wrestled calves on a Matador Land Company ranch in the Texas panhandle.Henry Wallace made a specialty of down-home conversation with farmers and their wives and of cross-examining the real-estate agents who profited from the government's commitment to sell water rights to the new property owners. He wrote what today we call New History, concentrating on the impact of irrigation on individuals more than technology, law, or institutions.Modern-day readers will prize Wallace's clear, expert analysis of the different environments that he visited and his farmer-conservationist ethic. Social historians will be interested as he explains how the closer proximity of irrigated farms and greater abundance of neighbors would produce prosperous communities with schools, roads, and social institutions better than most that then prevailed in America's rural regions. They will be fascinated to learn how the cooperative aspects of irrigation farming tempered the independence of the immigrants from the Corn Belt.