One of the foremost historians of Lewis and Clark, Ronda grounds "Finding the West" in the insights and reflections he has gleaned from some twenty years of research and writing about this pivotal era. But above all else, Rondaas book is centered on stories and storytellers. As he writes: aThis is a book about many storytellers. Their words are French-Canadian, Shoshone, New Hampshire English, Hidatsa, and Chinookan.a Ronda documents not only the stories that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark offered about their aroad across the continent, a but also the large and important stories by and about the native peoples whose trails they followed and whose lands they described in their journals and reports and on their maps.

The beginning of the nineteenth century represents a time when America passed into a headlong rush for empire and when athe Westa loomed large as a dream for some and a nightmare for others, an era that irrevocably shaped the new American nation in the two hundred years that followed. Whoever the storyteller in the aftermath of that encounteranative or newcomerathe stories all soon revolved around a common theme: the coming of the winds of change.

Rondaas masterful interpretation of the young Republicas fascination with the West is written with grace, narrative sweep, and a conviction that history should, above all else, engage and inform us.

aThis is a really outstanding, important work.aaProfessor John L. Allen, University of Wyoming

In centuries long past, a vast swath of grassland swept down the center of North America, from Canada's Prairie Provinces to central Texas. This once-plentiful prairie has now all but disappeared. Humans have grazed, mowed, and plowed the plains, dammed the rivers, and imposed their will on the land and its creatures. Fortunately, some remnants have survived, including the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in northeastern Oklahoma. In this visually stunning volume, wildlife photographer Harvey Payne and historian James P. Ronda offer an intimate look at and into one of America's Last Great Places. Spanning nearly 40,000 acres in Oklahoma's Osage County, the Preserve is a living witness to a world that once existed. But the Osage prairie is not a museum or theme park - and it is not frozen in time. Under the stewardship of The Nature Conservancy, which has overseen its restoration, the Preserve lives on as a fully functioning ecosystem. And for twenty-five years, Payne and Ronda have explored these lands, together and in solitude. Rendered here in brilliant color and paired with Ronda's informative yet deeply personal commentary, Payne's photographs open our eyes to the ever-changing world of the Tallgrass Preserve. In chapters focused on grass, sky, birds, bison, and fire, Ronda and Payne reveal that the ""Big Empty"" is, in fact, teeming with life. Through interwoven images and words, Visions of the Tallgrass shows that our nation's grasslands are sacred ground, a priceless piece of our American past - and future.

"To follow the journeys made by Mackay and Evans up the Missouri and across the plains in 1795-97 is to begin to appreciate the kind of world Lewis and Clark found when they voyaged up the river in 1804. . . . Of all those waterways, none has captured the American imagination more than the Missouri. . . . It is a river of promise, of dreams, and of dreams denied." -James P. Ronda, from the Foreword

When Mackay and Evans returned to Spanish St. Louis in 1797, they were hailed as "the two most illustrious travelers in the northern parts of this continent." Ironically, though the findings of Mackay and Evans were responsible for much of the early success of Lewis and Clark in their expedition, the adulation that followed Lewis and Clark's successful return completely eclipsed Mackay and Evans's reputations. In Prologue to Lewis and Clark, W. Raymond Wood narrates the history of this long-forgotten but important expedition up the Missouri River.

The Mackay and Evans expedition was more than an exploratory mission. It was the last effort by Spain to gain control over the Missouri River basin in the decade before the United States purchased the Louisiana territory. In that respect, it failed. But the expedition was successful as a journey of exploration. The maps and documents they created later provided the Lewis and Clark expedition with invaluable information for its first full year.

Consolidating a collection of eighteen contemporary documents relating to the Mackay and Evans expedition as well as his own research and analysis, Wood provides an in-depth examination of the expedition's background, execution, and final results.

"Volume 79 in the American Exploration and Travel Series"

Although he did not travel farther inland than the slopes of the Appalachians, Thomas Jefferson must take his place alongside Zebulon Pike, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and Lewis and Clark--the men who blazed the great western trails. Donald Jackson cogently recounts Jefferson's fundamental role in promoting and shaping the exploration, settlement, and development of the Trans-Mississippi West. "A first-rate piece of history and, just as important, a first-rate piece of writing. As a master documentarian, Jackson sees Jefferson as he was, not in adulation. But his portrait, and a long and absorbing one it is, gives us nonetheless an admirable and great figure, more human by far than most of the representations we have had in the past."-Savoie Lottinville, author of Rhetoric of History (OUPress) and Director Emeritus of the University of Oklahoma Press "Perhaps no one outside Jefferson himself has ever known as much about Jeffersonian Western exploration as Jackson, and this is a synthesis of that knowledge." -Dan Flores, Journal of the west

In 2010, the Anschutz Collection became the American Museum of Western Art--The Anschutz Collection, a public museum." Painters and the American West, Volume II "is a companion and sequel to the award-winning "Painters and the American West: The Anschutz Collection, "published in 2000. The present volume includes the finest works featured in the earlier book, along with major recent acquisitions by Alfred Jacob Miller, Charles Deas, William Ranney, Emanuel Leutze, Thomas Eakins, Thomas Anshutz, Henry Farny, N. C. Wyeth, William Herbert "Buck" Dunton, Edward Hopper, and many others.
In the foreword to this book, Sarah Hunt, director of the museum, tells the story of the Anschutz Collection's transition from a closely held treasure to an educational and esthetic resource for Denver and western art enthusiasts everywhere. In the book's introductory essay, distinguished scholar and curator John Wilmerding provides cultural and literary context for the museum's holdings, which include exemplary works by virtually every significant painter of the American West from the 1820s through the mid-twentieth century. Historical essays by acclaimed historian James P. Ronda introduce the six chapters of the book, setting the stage for in-depth examinations of individual masterworks by Joan Carpenter Troccoli.
Scholars have brought new insight to western American art in the past decade, and the European view of the westering experience as a defining characteristic of American history and culture is beginning to take hold among art historians on this side of the Atlantic. Western American art is shedding its outsider status and assuming its rightful place as an integral component of the history of American art--and American life. The 150 masterful images from over a century of painting that are showcased in this book expand our understanding of the place of the American West in the story of humankind.

"To follow the journeys made by Mackay and Evans up the Missouri and across the plains in 1795-97 is to begin to appreciate the kind of world Lewis and Clark found when they voyaged up the river in 1804. . . . Of all those waterways, none has captured the American imagination more than the Missouri. . . . It is a river of promise, of dreams, and of dreams denied." -James P. Ronda, from the Foreword

When Mackay and Evans returned to Spanish St. Louis in 1797, they were hailed as "the two most illustrious travelers in the northern parts of this continent." Ironically, though the findings of Mackay and Evans were responsible for much of the early success of Lewis and Clark in their expedition, the adulation that followed Lewis and Clark's successful return completely eclipsed Mackay and Evans's reputations. In Prologue to Lewis and Clark, W. Raymond Wood narrates the history of this long-forgotten but important expedition up the Missouri River.

The Mackay and Evans expedition was more than an exploratory mission. It was the last effort by Spain to gain control over the Missouri River basin in the decade before the United States purchased the Louisiana territory. In that respect, it failed. But the expedition was successful as a journey of exploration. The maps and documents they created later provided the Lewis and Clark expedition with invaluable information for its first full year.

Consolidating a collection of eighteen contemporary documents relating to the Mackay and Evans expedition as well as his own research and analysis, Wood provides an in-depth examination of the expedition's background, execution, and final results.

"Volume 79 in the American Exploration and Travel Series"

After political defeats and the loss of half his capital in a ranching venture in North Dakota, Theodore Roosevelt began writing his ambitious history of the conquest of the American West in 1888. He projected a sweeping drama, well documented and filled with Americans fighting Indian confederacies north and south while dealing with the machinations of the British, French, and Spanish and their sympathizers. Roosevelt wanted to show how backwoodsmen such as Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton, followed by hardy pioneer settlers, gave the United States eventual claim to land west of the Alleghanies. Heroism and treachery among both the whites and the Indians can be seen in his rapidly shifting story of a people on the move. By force and by treaty the new nation was established in the East, and when the explorers and settlers pushed against the Mississippi, everything west of the river was considered part of that nation. This final volume spans the period that saw Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio become states; Louisiana, Indiana, and Mississippi, territories. The successful campaigns of General Anthony Wayne and others intimidated the Indians into the first peace the border had known in fifty years. The treaties of John Jay and Thomas Pinckney firmed American boundaries and stopped the intrigues of the British and Spanish. As in the other volumes, Roosevelt ties many-sided events into an exciting narrative. He describes in detail the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Pacific following the Louisiana Purchase.

In his 1836 account Washington Irving immortalized Astoria, but it has been a footnote to the history of western expansion--a doleful reminder of John Jacob Astor's failed attempt to establish a fur-trading empire at the mouth of the Columbia from 1810 to 1813. Now James P. Ronda makes clear the importance of the Astoria venture in large and complex struggle for national sovereignty in the Northwest. Astoria and Empire is the first modern account and assessment of Astor's enterprise and the first ever to unravel the tangled skein of Astoria's international connections. "On the Columbia," Ronda writes, "lines of national rivalry, personal ambition, and cultural diversity intersected to shape a larger continental destiny."

In examining the ways in which Astor's Pacific Fur Company attempted to create the first American empire west of the Rockies, Ronda offers new interpretations of Astoria's origins, of Astor's role as an imperial strategist who negotiated with the Russian American Company and fought with the archrival North West Company, and of his intricate schemes to save Astoria from ruin during the War of 1812. Astoria and Empire draws on important archival sources only recently discovered, including Duncan McDougall's journal, which allows the reconstruction of daily life at Astoria. If the book is a study of rival empires, it is also a social history of exploration and the fur trade. Richly detailed, it teems with Indians of many tribes and international cast of traders, naval officers, diplomats, and rogues. They act on a historical stage stretching from Russia and the Orient to North America and from New York, Washington, and St. Louis to Astoria, the crossroads of an empire.

Epic in sweep and reach, strongly written and superbly researched, "The American Fur Trade of the Far West" is a classic if there ever was one. Its publication in 1902 made clear how much the fur trade was "indissolubly connected to the history of North America."

Chittenden brought to this enduring work an appreciation of geography and a feeling for the lives and times of colorful trappers and mountain men like Manuel Lisa, William H. Ashley, the Sublette brothers, Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, and Kenneth McKenzie. He provided a comprehensive view of the fur trade that still remains sound.

Volume 1 of the Bison edition includes the organization and financing of the fur trade and a detailed history of the major American companies operating in the trans-Mississippi West to the year 1843.

Ronda forms a compelling narrative of Lewis and Clark's expedition and their encounters with Indians. A story of discovery and suspense, it is told with a modern concern to understand the Indian side as well as the white side in this meeting of two cultures. Illustrations. Maps.