The full story of the Santa Fe Trail, from the arrival of the Spanish, the founding of Santa Fe in 1610 and the arrival of the first French and American traders, the establishment of the trail, and what happened after its glory days ended.

Here are the men who pioneered trade between Saint Louis and Santa Fe, the hardships they endured, the wonderful scenery they travelled through and wrote about, the huge amount of goods they moved, and the fun they had in Santa Fe and along the trail. Drawing from letters, diaries, reports, and first-hand reminiscences, Dary fleshes out the story of the men who opened commerce with Spanish America. There are Indians and mountain men, traders and trappers, merchants, surveyors, government commissioners, Spanish people, Americans, Frenchmen, and people of almost every other nationality.

A splendid recreation of an important part of American history, fully illustrated with photographs and woodcuts of the period.

A nationwide bestseller--with more than 65,000 copies in print since publication by Alfred A. Knopf in 1981, this fascinating chronicle of cowboy life and legend is now available in a trade paperback edition. It's the 500-year saga of the "real cowboy"--from fifteenth-century Mexico to the twentieth-century American West.

Ever wonder why cowboys sing? Or where Henry Starr's treasure is buried? Or what legend lies behind the origin of the word ""rawhide""? The prairies and plains are bursting with stories, a region whose flat openness belies a colorful history that's now captured in this cornucopia of colorful tales. David Dary is a master storyteller and award-winning historian who was born in the region and still calls it home. In this book, he shares forty forgotten tales that capture the history, romance, and lore of early life on the plains and prairie - rollicking adventures set between the Rio Grande and the Canadian border that reflect the reality of life in the region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These stories have been gleaned from old newspaper accounts and little-known published sources, reflecting Dary's intimate knowledge of his stomping ground. A veritable treasury of lost legends, the book blends history and folklore to offer a fond look back at settlers and Indians, desperados and cowboys - including just how it is that the latter became known for singing. In these enchanting vignettes, Dary takes readers along trails and rails to tell how the Staked Plains got their name and to recall times when women were scarce. He unearths legends of buried treasure spanning the region and spins tales of buffalo and bears. He tells of famous lawmen like Seth Bullock of Deadwood fame and outlaws like Belle Starr, and sheds light on other famous and obscure personalities, from Chief Old Wolf to Fort Mann's woman soldier, Caroline Newcomb, to Teddy Roosevelt, the badlands rancher who became president. For anyone who thinks of America's middle as dull, ""True Tales of the Prairies and Plains"" offers a corrective that entertains as it informs. It is a book as wide-ranging as the land it covers, preserving nuggets of lore from perpetual obscurity and promising readers hours of enjoyment, whether on or off the trail.

"Authentic history, delightfully told" is the way Ray A. Billington, renowned historian of the Old West, described this collection. David Dary, award-winning chronicler of life on the frontier plains, is at his entertaining best in these thirty-nine episodes, sagas, and tales from Kansas's vigorous, free-spirited past. Many of the stories appeared in Dary's True Tales of the Old-Time Plains, but that book, out of print for several years, focused on the Great Plains in general. This new edition, revised and with additional stories and a new title, pulls together tales about people, animals and events in what is today Kansas, including the old territory of Kansas (1854-1861) that stretched from the Missouri River westward to the summit of the Rocky Mountains.

Many of the tales capture the romance, excitement, and adventure of the Old West, while others have the tempo of a quiet life surrounded by the immensity of the plains and prairies. There are well-known characters: Bill Cody, the Dalton gang, the Bloody Benders, William Clarke Quantrill, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederic Remington, who once owned a Kansas sheep ranch and later was a silent partner in a Kansas City saloon before he became a well-known artist.

And there are stories, too, about little-known characters such as Prairie Dog Dave Morrow, who made his living capturing live prairie dogs. Dary relates tales of lost treasure and sudden riches, of outlaws and "jayhawk" raiders, of massacres and heroics. A generous number of illustrations help bring the tales to life.

"Rollicking, adventurous, touching" is how American West magazine described David Dary's first collection of stories, "True Tales of Old-Time Kansas." This sequel, containing forty-one episodes, sagas, and legends from Kansas's vigorous, free-spirited past, shows Dary again at his entertaining best.

More True Tales is filled with engaging stories of outlaws and lawmen, trailride adventures, buried treasures, natural catastrophes, the famous and the obscure. Sometimes romantic and always colorful, these stories touch on the struggles and hardships encountered by the pioneers as they attempted to adjust to life in early Kansas. The tales reflect the pioneering spirit of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in this part of the country--love of freedom and individualism, and a healthy respect for Nature.

In these pages Dary brings to life the excitement and adventure of the Old West: the revenge and vengeance of Bloody Bill Anderson and Dutch Henry, the exploits of bank and train robber Bill Doolen, mayhem in the state's most violent town. Colorful hermits and trappers, traders and town builders join historical characters such as William Becknell, Father of the Santa Fe Trail--whose expedition turned a two thousand percent profit--and Lizzie Johnson Williams, the first woman to follow the Western Trail. The publisher Horace Greeley described urban life along the Santa Fe Trail: "It takes three log houses to make a city in Kansas, but they begin calling it a city as soon as they have staked out the lots."

Dary recounts vividly the onslaught of cyclones, tornadoes, floods, droughts, blizzards, grasshopper hordes, and dreaded prairie fires. And he includes a section of amazing tall tales--such fish stories as harnessed catfish pulling boats along the Neosho River.

A generous number of illustrations helps bring the tales to life.

For Dary's many fans, this new collection provides more of what Ray A. Billington, renowned historian of the Old West, described as "authentic history, delightfully told." And, as Richard Bartlett, author of Great Surveys of the American West said of the first True Tales volume, "Where else but in the frontier West were such stories really lived?"

Do you know how Oklahoma came to have a panhandle? Did you know that Washington Irving once visited what is now Oklahoma? Can you name the official state rock, or list the courses in the official state meal? The answers to these questions, and others you may not have thought to ask, can be found in this engaging collection of tales by renowned journalist-historian David Dary.
Most of the stories gathered here first appeared as newspaper articles during the state centennial in 2007. For this volume Dary has revised and expanded them--and added new ones. He begins with an overview of Oklahoma's rich and varied history and geography, describing the origins of its trails, rails, and waterways and recounting the many tales of buried treasure that are part of Oklahoma lore.
But the heart of any state is its people, and Dary introduces us to Oklahomans ranging from Indian leaders Quanah Parker and Satanta, to lawmen Bass Reeves and Bill Tilghman, to twentieth-century performing artists Woody Guthrie, Will Rogers, and Gene Autry. Dary also writes about forts and stagecoaches, cattle ranching and oil, outlaws and lawmen, inventors and politicians, and the names and pronunciation of Oklahoma towns. And he salutes such intellectual and artistic heroes as distinguished teacher and writer Angie Debo and artist and educator Oscar Jacobson, one of the first to focus world attention on Indian art.
Reading this book is like listening to a knowledgeable old-timer regale his audience with historical anecdotes, "so it was said" tall tales, and musings on what it all means. Whether you're a native of the Sooner State or a newcomer, you are sure to learn much from these accounts of the people, places, history, and folklore of Oklahoma.

A major one-volume history of the Oregon Trail from its earliest beginnings to the present, by a prize-winning historian of the American West.
Starting with an overview of Oregon Country in the early 1800s, a vast area then the object of international rivalry among Spain, Britain, Russia, and the United States, David Dary gives us the whole sweeping story of those who came to explore, to exploit, and, finally, to settle there.
Using diaries, journals, company and expedition reports, and newspaper accounts, David Dary takes us inside the experience of the continuing waves of people who traveled the Oregon Trail or took its cutoffs to Utah, Nevada, Montana, Idaho, and California. He introduces us to the fur traders who set up the first "forts" as centers to ply their trade; the missionaries bent on converting the Indians to Christianity; the mountain men and voyageurs who settled down at last in the fertile Willamette Valley; the farmers and their families propelled west by economic bad times in the East; and, of course, the gold-seekers, Pony Express riders, journalists, artists, and entrepreneurs who all added their unique presence to the land they traversed.
We meet well-known figures-John Jacob Astor, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, John Fremont, the Donners, and Red Cloud, among others-as well as dozens of little-known men, women, and children who jotted down what they were seeing and feeling in journals, letters, or perhaps even on a rock or a gravestone.
Throughout, Dary keeps us informed of developments in the East and their influence on events in the West, among them the building of the transcontinental railroad and the efforts of the far western settlements tobecome U.S. territories and eventually states.
Above all, "The Oregon Trail offers a panoramic look at the romance, colorful stories, hardships, and joys of the pioneers who made up this tremendous and historic migration.

It started as a search for heroes. It became a hunt for the most elusive equestrian charlatan of all time. If Frank Hopkins is to be believed, he led one of the most exciting, challenging and colorful (albeit unrecorded) lives in the late nineteenth century. No one rode more miles, eluded more danger, or befriended more famous people than he did. During the 1930s and 40s the self-proclaimed legend told a na ve American public that he had won nearly five hundred endurance races, including an imaginary race across Arabia on a mythical mustang named Hidalgo. Hopkins remarkable career supposedly began when he became a dispatch rider for the US government on his twelfth birthday in 1877. According to his mythology, this Renaissance Man of the Old West went on to work as a buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, African explorer, endurance racer, trick rider, bounty hunter, Rough Rider, big game guide, secret agent, Pinkerton detective and star of the Wild West show. Experts beg to differ. This book contains an unprecedented study, undertaken by more than seventy experts in five countries, ranging from the Curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum to the former Sultan of Yemen. These academics investigated the historical improbability of Hopkins claims and weighed him on his merit, not his myth. The resulting exhaustive study revealed that Hopkins had maintained a spirited disregard for the truth, plagiarized material from famous authors, slandered genuine American heroes and perpetrated a massive fraud for nearly one hundred years. Far from being the star of Buffalo Bill Cody s Wild West show for 32 years, for example, the counterfeit cowboy was discovered working as a subway tunnel digger in Philadelphia and a horse-handler for Ringling Brothers Circus. It is his endurance racing pretensions, however, that have brought Hopkins his greatest notoriety and made him the hero of a Hollywood movie. Yet there is not even a documented photograph of Frank Hopkins in the saddle Here then are all the known writings of Frank T. Hopkins, published in their entirety for the first time in history.

In Red Blood and Black Ink, bestselling author David Dary chronicles the long, exciting, often surprising story of journalism in the Old West -- from the freewheeling days of the early 1800s to the classic small-town weeklies and busy city newsrooms of the 1920s.

Here are the printers who founded the first papers, arriving in town with a shirttail of type and a secondhand press, setting up shop under trees, in tents, in barns or storefronts, moving on when the town failed, or into larger quarters if it flourished, and sometimes forced to defend their right of free speech with fists or guns.

Here, too, are Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Horace Greeley -- and William Allen White writing on the death of his young daughter. Here is the Telegraph and Texas Register article that launched the legend of the Alamo, and dozens of tongue-in-cheek, brilliant, or moving reports of national events and local doings, including holdups, train robberies, wars, elections, shouting matches, weddings, funerals, births, and much, much more.

In this earliest known day-by-day journal of a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas, Jack Bailey, a North Texas farmer, describes what it was like to live and work as a cowboy in the southern plains just after the Civil War. We follow Bailey as the drive moves northward into Kansas and then as his party returns to Texas through eastern Kansas, southwestern Missouri, northwestern Arkansas, and Indian Territory.

For readers steeped in romantic cowboy legend, the journal contains surprises. Bailey's time on the trail was hardly lonely. We travel with him as he encounters Indians, U.S. soldiers, Mexicans, freed slaves, and cowboys working other drives. He and other crew members--including women--battle hunger, thirst, illness, discomfort, and pain. Cowboys quarrel and play practical jokes on each other and, at night, sing songs around the campfire.

David Dary's thorough introduction and footnotes place the journal in historical context.

In the development of the American West, no two decades were so full of romance and change as the years from the California gold rush of 1849 to the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869. In two decades, the West was conquered and the secession movement rose and fell. From slow ox-team and prairie schooner to the dashing Pony Express, the overland mail service mirrored these monumental strides.

Originally published in 1926, "The Overland Mail" was the first scholarly work to examine the impact of the postal service on the expansion of the West as the service evolved from a private endeavor to a government-contracted business. LeRoy R. Hafen details how the mail service tied West to East, influenced politics and economics, promoted use of the overland trails, aided in settlement, and helped usher in the railroads.

This classic work is here available in paperback for the first time. In a new foreword, David Dary assesses Hafen's contributions as a writer and historian.