Critics have called David Lavender a "master storyteller" (Library Journal), his prose "virile, disciplined, yet personal" (New York Times), and his book "a balanced, learned, and lively history of an
“In one very real sense,” David Lavender writes, “the story of the Oregon Trail begins with Columbus.” This opening suggests the panoramic sweep of his history of that famous trail. In chiseled, color
Bent's Fort was a landmark of the American frontier, a huge private fort on the upper Arkansas River in present southeastern Colorado. Established by the adventurers Charles and William Bent, it stood
In Let Me Be Free, David Lavender tells the tragic story of the Nez Perce struggle against annihilation. Encroaching settlers and violent disputes resulted in the Nez Perce War of 1877, a desperate at
The ferocity and magnitude of the American Civil War eclipses that of all other nineteenth-century conflicts, but the hard fighting and tactics that played out between the North and South were first d
The exploration and conquest of the Pacific Northwest is the dominant theme of Land of Giants, a book which (in the words of William O. Douglas) "gives one a sense of participation in moulding the man
Reprints the 1970 biography (originally published by Doubleday) of a railroad mogul whose family supplied the author with material never before made public. The book explains how Huntington operated,
First published in 1980 as part of Harper & Row's Regions of America series, this lively account is now available only from the University of New Mexico Press. Focusing on New Mexico and Arizona,
The story of the American fur trade has been told many times from different viewpoints, but David Lavender was the first to place it within the overall contest for empire between Britain and the Unite
Before Canyonlands was a national park, before tourists discovered the wildness and wonder of the Maze and the Land of Standing Rocks, before the San Rafael Desert became a hive of mineral exploratio
The American West of the 1930s and 1940s was still a place of prospectors, cowboys, ranchers, and mountaineers, one that demanded backbreaking, lonely, and dangerous work. Still, midcentury pioneers s
