In 1852 a record number of women helped keep the wagons rolling over the perilous western trails. The fourth volume of Covered Wagon Women is devoted to families headed for California that year. Diari
Abigail Jane Scott was seventeen when she left Illinois with her family in the spring of 1852. Her record of the journey west is full of expressive detail: breakfasting in a snowstorm, walking behind
“We traveled this forenoon over the roughest and most desolate piece of ground that was ever made,” wrote Amelia Knight during her 1853 wagon train journey to Oregon. Some of the parties who traveled
Sergeant Charles Windolph was the last white survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn when he described it nearly seventy years later. A six-year veteran of the Seventh Cavalry, Windolph fought
The wagon trains to California greatly decreased in 1851 as reports of deadly cholera on the trail the year before and strikeouts in gold prospecting became known. Those who did go west—about 2,160 me
The true meaning of Christmas emerges in these stories about reunited families, good fellowship, and restored faith. This is not to say that all is sugar candy. The mother in the title story faces a
In the 1880s, when adventure lay in the conquest of the prairies, David Beaton and his bride came to Dakota to claim three hundred acres of grassland. Rose Wilder Lane tells of their struggle to surv
In Old Home Town, Rose Wilder Lane has recreated small-town society of pre-World War I America with a precise feeling for decorum, dress, and kitchen dialogue. Like Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohi
The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Their Ways of Life is a classic ethnography, originally published in 1928, that grew out of George Bird Grinnell's long acquaintance with the Cheyennes. In Volu
The story tells of the gambler and townsite promoter who founded Cozad, Nebraska, and of his family, particularly his younger son, [who] became a world-famous artist and teacher known as 'Robert Henr
The Earp Brothers of Tombstone and the famous fight at the O. K. Corral are well known to American history and even better known to American legend. This composite biography of Wyatt, Morgan, Virgil,
In The Devil's Dictionary Ambrose Bierce defined "war" as "a by-product of the arts of peace." A Civil War veteran, Bierce had absolutely no illusions about "courage," "honor," and "glory" on the bat
Valeria had come to Montana to marry a cowboy named Manley, expecting a future full of companionship and bracing freedom, lodges with great fireplaces and bearskin rugs, manageable cattle and sleek ho
Marcel Bénabou is quick to acknowledge that his own difficulty in writing has plenty of company. Words stick and syntax is stubborn, meaning slips and synonyms cluster. A blank page taunts and a
The Crab Nebula is comprised of fifty-two vivid chapters that provide startling insights into the existence of this nebulous man named Crab: his nightmarish - and none too solid - physique, his myste
Three years before the civic-minded Carol Kennicott came to life in Main Street, Una Golden was confronting the male dinosaurs of business. Like Carol, the heroine of The Job is one of Sinclair Lewis'
In La funcion delta (1981), the second novel of the best-selling Spanish author Rosa Montero, the real world is as unmapped and treacherous as ever for her countrywomen, but more universal concerns im
Susie Doheny, an Irish Catholic, and Peder Holm, a Norwegian Lutheran, fall in love and marry in South Dakota in the 1890s. Soon their marriage is tested by drought, depression, and family bickering.
