"If I had not spent my year in North Dakota, I would never have become President of the United States," declared Theodore Roosevelt. The future statesman took his first steps toward the highest office in the land in the Dakota Badlands of the 1880s, where he began his transformation from aristocrat to democrat. Roosevelt left his home in the East as Theodore, but he returned as "Teddy," a rugged outdoorsman and soon-to-be hero of the Rough Riders.
Recounted with infectious enthusiasm, Roosevelt's tales range from ranching on the open plains to hunting in the mountains. His reminiscences conjure up the vanished world of the frontier, with thrilling accounts of chasing bighorn sheep and horse thieves, encountering Indians, branding cattle, and bronco busting. Roosevelt's recollections helped elevate the cowboy's image from that of an ordinary farm laborer into a figure of nobility and courage. The works of Frederic Remington, another great mythmaker of the Old West, illustrate these memoirs. Sixty-five black-and-white images by this renowned American artist complement Roosevelt's stories of freedom and self-reliance.

No one knew how the blue-eyed, blond-haired white baby came to be abandoned, but the Crow tribe that found him raised him as one of its own. As he grew into adolescence, White Weasel was taken to Crooked-Bear, a white man who had long ago abandoned society for a solitary mountain existence and who acted as counselor to the Crow elders. Under Crooked-Bear's tutelage, White Weasel was schooled in white ways and rechristened John Ermine. Frederic Remington's compelling tale relates Ermine's successful reintroduction into white society, his heroic exploits as a scout in the military, and his growing interest in a white lady, Miss Katherine Searles. In his love for Katherine, Ermine must face the complexities and inequalities of American society. Although American culture may well laud Ermine's military prowess and personal integrity, since he is "wild" he can never truly rise through the ranks of society. It is inevitable that Ermine's story ends in tragedy.
"John Ermine of the Yellowstone" is both an epic Western in the classic sense and a complex tale that captures the conflict between European Americans and Native Americans in the Wild West. John Ermine is the tragic character caught between two cultures, unable to assimilate fully into either. Famed artist Frederic Remington uses his pen to convey the irreparable stalemate between two groups of people in an untamed West while making a moving argument for the preservation of a truly wild western front.

In the summer of 1854, Longfellow wrote in his diary "I have at length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians, which seems to me the right one and the only. It is to weave together their beautiful traditions as whole." What emerged the next year was "The Song of Hiawatha," a composite of legends, folklore, myth, and characters that presents, in short, lilting lines (who can forget "By the shore of Gitche-Gumme / By the shining Big-Sea Water"?) the life-story of a real Indian, who provides the focus for the narrative thread of this epic drama of high adventure, tragedy and conflict.The aim was not to tell a particular or specific story but to unite the strands of various Indian legends, to present a sympathetic portrait of many Native American tribes, and especially to disclose their profound relationship with the natural world. This when both government policies and an expanding, land-hungry population were just beginning their inexorable campaign of displacement and annihilation.The poem received a decidedly mixed reception. Our own "Boston Traveller" revealed its biases: "We cannot help but express our regret that our own pet national poet should not have selected as a theme of his muse something better and higher than the silly legends of the savage aborigines." Despite this, the poem entered into our canon of great narratives, and was revived again in 1891 when Remington, surely the most renowned artist of the West, provided with new pen and ink drawings.This handsome new, and freshly reset, edition (the only unabridged version in print) presents the full text, includes all 400 of the original Remington illustrations, and provides an index of the Indian names and their meanings.