A fascinating account of the famed expedition draws on the personal journals of the explorers themselves to re-examine their odyssey in light of the cultural prejudices and goals of Lewis and Clark, offers profiles of Sacajawea and York, Clark's slave, and discusses the meaning and impact of the journey. 17,500 first printing.

New in paperback What was achieved and destroyed, what was made up and forgotten in the American West as the continent was mapped, the natives were displaced, and exploits were transformed into legends? In this acclaimed collection, Larry McMurtry profiles explorers and martyrs, hucksters and scholars--figures in the West's enduring yet ever-shifting mixture of myth and reality. In these twelve pieces, McMurtry explores John Wesley Powell's journey on the Colorado, the dispossession of the Five Civilized Tribes, the fascination the Zuni held over a parade of unscrupulous anthropologists, and--in the bicentennial of their journey--the journals of Lewis and Clark, "our only really American epic."

A provocative reassessment of the legendary American outlaw chronicles the life and times of Jesse James, from his youth in a fiercely pro-slavery Missouri, to his teenage years fighting alongside Confederate guerrillas, to his alliance with other ex-Confederates to gain political power, to his criminal career. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

Collects the letters of the wife of Civil War major general Benjamin H. Grierson, describing daily life and hardships at frontier posts like Fort Riley, Fort Concho, Fort Davis, and Fort Grant

A colorful account of five centuries of cowboy culture details the life, history, customs, status, job, equipment, and more of the cowboy from sixteenth-century Spanish Mexico to the present

Jesse and Frank James were household names long before images of America's most wanted were televised. For several decades after the Civil War, they were hunted by hundreds who supposed them to be involved in every bank and train robbery in the Midwest. Trained as guerrilla fighters in the border conflict between Kansas and Missouri, they joined with the Younger brothers in February 1866 to rob a bank in Liberty, Missouri. That was the beginning of a criminal confederation that seemed beyond the reach of the law until the Northfield, Minnesota, raid killed three of them and sent the James brothers into hiding. But they were the objects of posted rewards that proved too tempting in Jesse's case: in 1882 he was shot in the back by Robert Ford of his own gang. The Rise and Fall of Jesse James, by Robertus Love, a newspaperman who knew Frank James, is a pioneering work that plumbs the personalities of the outlaws, looks at their domestic lives, cites many stories about them, and attempts to separate fact from legend in tracking their violent operations. Michael Fellman assesses Love's 1926 book in his introduction to this Bison Books edition.

A revisionist history of the American West traces how the railroad led to new agricultural opportunities including the migrations of innumerable harvest workers, who with their families made significant contributions to the region's settlement and fledgling economy.

Profiles twenty-one of the West's gun-slinging “bad girls," from serial killer Kate Bender to Elizabeth Potts and Ellen Watson, the first women hanged in Nevada and Wyoming. Meet these fascinating characters, complete with their pistols and petticoats, their knives and knaves, their vices and victims.