Full AspenCat Catalog

Includes "writings of more than a hundred women" who experienced the "trip across the continent." Revised edition includes material on "young girls ... between eight and sixteen for whom the monumental crossing was a lark."

"In June 1846, General Stephen Watts Kearny rode out of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with two thousand soldiers, bound for California. At the time, the nation was hell-bent on expansion: James K. Polk had lately won the presidency by threatening England over the borders in Oregon, while Congress had just voted, in defiance of the Mexican government, to annex Texas. After Mexico declared war on the United States, Kearny's Army of the West was sent out,...

"This collection of short, action-filled stories of the Old West's most egregiously badly behaved female outlaws, gamblers, soiled doves, and other wicked women by award-winning Western history author Chris Enss offers a glimpse into Western Women's experience that's less sunbonnets and more six-shooters. During the late nineteenth century, while men were settling the new frontier and rushing off to the latest boom towns, women of easy virtue found...

They came by river and by wagon train, braving the endless distances of the Great Plains and the icy passes of the Sierra Nevada. They were men like Linus Rawlings, a restless survivor of Indian country who'd headed east to see the ocean but left his heart--and his home--in the West. They were women like Lilith Prescott, a smart, spirited beauty who fled her family and fell for a gambling man in the midst of a frontier gold boom. These pioneering...

Twenty-two years have passed since Tim Colter and his family were ambushed on the Oregon Trail, forcing the young boy to find an unlikely ally in one-eyed mountain man Jed Reno. Now a widowed deputy U.S. marshal and Civil War veteran, Colter is finally ready to remarry and settle down--until a dangerous new assignment becomes a life-or-death struggle for the soul of a town and the heart of its people . . . The Union Pacific Railroad is laying down...

This book explores what life was like for the cowboys and describes a cowboy's gear, a cowboy's skills, a cattle drive, and the cowtowns.

The near extinction of the buffalo herds of the Great Plains in the nineteenth century was the product of several factors, including the greed of buffalo hunters, the callousness of "sportsmen," and the desire of the federal government to deprive the Plains Indians of their food source. But the buffalo did (barely) survive, and one of their unlikely saviors was Grinnell, a Brooklyn-born, Yale-educated anthropologist and naturalist. Grinnell was entranced...

"The best all-around study of the American cowboy ever written. Every page crackles with keen analysis and vivid prose about the Old West. A must-read!" - Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America The open-range cattle era lasted barely a quarter century, but it left America irrevocably changed. Cattle Kingdom reveals how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The...

Inspiration drawn from letters, journals, historical sources, and quilts--essential vehicles of women's storytelling through the years--fills this narrative re-creation of the history of the West, from the time of the early pioneers to the present day. 70 color photos. 60 b&w photos. 20 line drawings.