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In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters. How McCandless came to die is the...
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"How did Davy Crockett save President Jackson's life--only to end up dying at the Alamo? Was the Lone Ranger based on a real lawman--and was he an African American? What amazing detective work led to the capture of Black Bart, the 'gentleman bandit' and one of the West's most famous stagecoach robbers? Did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid really die in a hail of bullets in South America? Generations of Americans have grown up on TV shows, movies,...
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"From the creator of the "Legends of the Old West" podcast, a book exploring the overlapping narratives of the biggest legends in frontier mythology. The summer of 1876 was a key time period in the development of the mythology of the Old West. Many individuals who are considered legends by modern readers were involved in events that began their notoriety or turned out to be the most famous - or infamous - moments of their lives. Those individuals...
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"For a century Butch Cassidy has been the subject of legends about his life and death, spawning a small industry of mythmakers and a major Hollywood film. Charles Leerhsen sorts out fact from fiction to find the real Butch Cassidy, who is far more complicated and fascinating than legend has it"--
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Nat Love, the son of enslaved parents, was born in 1854 on a plantation in Davidson County, Tennessee. In February 1869, Love left Tennessee and found work as a cowboy, first in the Texas panhandle, then in Arizona. Love's story, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, was published in 1907, and it is considered the only full-length autobiography by an African-American cowhand.
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As the West unfolded, its legends were even bigger than life. The West was some sort of grand notion where fact and fiction freely intermingled and have all but become inseparable. The tall tales and folklore along with the beliefs and rituals of the Native Americans are as much a part of the legacy of the West as is its history. In this program historians reveal the myths and realities of these romantic and often imaginary tales.
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Early in the nineteenth century, the mountain men emerged as a small but distinctive group whose knowledge and experience of the trans-Mississippi West extended the national consciousness to continental dimensions. Though Lewis and Clark blazed a narrow corridor of geographical reality, the West remained largely terra incognita until trappers and traders—Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick, Jedediah Smith—opened paths through the...
11) The West
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Professor Scharff continues the story of Jefferson's Empire of Liberty. Railroads and ranchers, rabble-rousers and racists populate America's distant frontiers, and Native Americans are displaced from their homelands. Feminists gain a foothold in their fight for the right to vote, while farmers organize and the Populist Party appears on the American political landscape.
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"In this book Wallace Stegner recounts the successes and frustrations of John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of Indian tribes of the American Southwest. A prophet without honor who had a profound understanding of the American West, Powell warned long ago of the dangers economic exploitation would pose to the West and spent a good deal of his life overcoming...
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"In the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a stunningly vivid historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah, the greatest Comanche chief of them all. S.C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one...
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"This young readers edition of the New York Times bestseller of the same name tells the long forgotten story of the powerful Oglala Lakota chief, Red Cloud. At the height of Red Cloud's power the Sioux claimed control of vast parts of the west. But as the United States rapidly expanded, the country brutally forced the Indians off their lands. Fighting for the survival of the Sioux way of life, Red Cloud successfully secured the loyalty of thousands...
17) Son of the Old West: the odyssey of Charlie Siringo: cowboy, detective, writer of the wild frontier
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"An epic account of the Old West and a vivid portrait of the outsized life of cowboy, detective, and chronicler Charlie Siringo. No figure in the Old West lived or influenced its legacy more fully than Charlie Siringo. Born in Matagorda, Texas, in 1855, Charlie went on his first cattle drive at age 11 and spent two decades living his boyhood dream as a cowboy. As the dangerous, lucrative "beeves" business boomed, Siringo drove longhorn steers north...
18) The Donner Party
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"In graphic novel format, tells the story of the Donner Party's struggle to reach California despite harsh weather and starvation"--Provided by publisher.
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"The public lands of the western United States comprise some 450 million acres of grassland, steppe land, canyons, forests, and mountains. It's an American commons, and it is under assault as never before. Journalist Christopher Ketcham has been documenting the confluence of commercial exploitation and governmental misconduct in this region for over a decade. His revelatory book takes the reader on a journey across these last wild places, to see how...