In the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, the federal government put thousands of unemployed writers to work in the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Out of their efforts came the American Guide series, the first comprehensive guidebooks to the people, resources, and traditions of each state in the union.

The WPA Guide to Minnesota is a lively and detailed introduction to the state and its people. Much has changed since the book's first publication in 1938 when, as the authors noted, some Minnesotans could "clearly recall ... the sight of browsing buffalo herds, and the creaking of thong-tied Red River carts." But the book vividly recaptures the era when annual fishing licenses cost fifty cents, farmers ran barn dances for motoring townfolk, Duluth was the headquarters of the Hay Fever Club of America, and the nearly new Foshay Tower loomed on the Minneapolis skyline.

The guide has much more than nostalgia to offer today's readers. Twenty auto tours and six special city tours tell the stories of the state's people and places and offer a fascinating alternative to freeway travel. Essays on major themes such as native peoples, history, arts, transportation, and sports provide an authentic self-portrait of 1930s Minnesota in humorous, loving, and literary prose.

This time-travelers' guide to Minnesota is an evocative reminder of the state's past and a challenge to contemporary readers who seek to find how that past lives on today.

Special features include 20 road trips, 6 city tours, 15 boundary waters canoe trips, 12 maps, 22 drawings, an introduction by the renowned Midwestern writer Frederick Manfred, a chronology, and a revisedbibliography.

Frederick Manfred was the author of Lord Grizzly, finalist for the National Book Award, as well as twenty-six other novels and short story collections, many of which explore nuanced struggles with death and other life challenges which demand toughness and resilience. Although a work of fiction, Boy Almighty conveys Manfred's dramatic personal story of contracting tuberculosis as a young man and being cared for at a convalescent home at the Glen Lake Sanatorium in Minnesota. A remarkable blend of stream-of-consciousness and objective reporting, Boy Almighty is the story of a man in the throes of dissolution and disintegration from tuberculosis and of his recovery, reintegration, and rebirth. Eric Frey, sensitive, aware, in love with life, yet beset with frustration and failure, is at first too ill to be placed in a tubercular ward, where his almost certain death would be upsetting to the other patients. Running concurrently with the inner story of Frey's mind is the story of his body's struggle to survive. Boy Almighty is a profound and compelling study of a man who desperately wants to live and of his relationships with doctors, nurses, roommates, and a fellow patient who teaches him the meaning of love.

Under the veil of one of the oldest and most tragic myths known to humankind, a king is born. Magnus King, the son of a well-born English woman, continues his family's aristocratic legacy on the frontier of the American West until the night a deadly shooting changes everything.

Young Earl Ransom, a man found long ago on the Cheyenne prairie with no memory of his past or of how his destiny is linked to that of Magnus King, finds his way through a tale as old and tragic as the Greek myth of Oedipus.
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"King of Spades" is the final volume of Frederick Manfred's acclaimed five-volume series, The Buckskin Man Tales. For this Bison Books Classic edition, Joel Johnson provides a new introduction.

High on a remote butte, a young Sioux waits. Though daring in battle, skillful, and strong, he cannot be a man until his spiritual vision comes. When it appears, he must interpret it correctly to know who he is, and he must deserve it or continue to be called No Name. No Name has his vision, a glowing white mare who walks among the stars. She tells No Name his destiny and how to achieve it. He must pass through hostile camps, storm, and fire, risking his life many times to become Conquering Horse, chief of the Sioux. Conquering Horse is the first of Frederick Manfred's five-volume series, The Buckskin Man Tales.

In 1862 the largest Indian uprising in American history occurred in southern Minnesota. Enraged Sioux attempted to throw off the broken treaties that still bound them and to avenge the insults and depredations they had been forced to bear. Hundreds of whites were killed. Women were taken captive. Told from the point of view of Judith Raveling, a young woman widowed by the uprising, Scarlet Plume draws on the brutal history of the conflict from beginning to end. Taken captive by the Sioux, Judith is given to Scarlet Plume, one of the many warriors who know their cause is lost. Caught between the men who would wage war ruthlessly and his own judgment, which tells him how dearly the Sioux will pay for every white person killed, Scarlet Plume tries to save as many as he can. Defying the dangers of a pitiless war, he returns Judith to the safety of her people. Soon she must try to save him. Scarlet Plume is the third of Frederick Manfred's five-volume series, The Buckskin Man Tales.

Here is a rich and serious novel of the violent West. Full of the authentic sounds and colors of Wyoming cattle country in the late nineteenth century, it tells the true story of a long-vanished time--the era of the cowhands and the bloody Johnson County range wars.Riders of Judgment centers on the three Hammett brothers and their cousin Rosemary, whom all three love. To the oldest brother, Cain, falls the lot of avenging the murder of his father, grandfather, and brother. Cain--who is in a sense a cowboy Hamlet--is torn by conflicts within himself. He desires peace yet is forced to wear a gun. He is a law-abiding man by instinct yet has to take the law into his own hands. He is loved by a woman but rejects her because he feels unworthy of her love.Then one spring morning the cattle barons invade his territory, and Cain's hesitancy vanishes. One man's inner struggle becomes a fight to turn the cattle kingdom into a free country for the small stockman.Riders of Judgment is the final book in Frederick Manfred's five-volume series, The Buckskin Man Tales.

Hunter, trapper, resourceful fighter, and scout, Hugh Glass was just a rugged man among other rugged American frontiersmen until he was mauled by a grizzly bear and left for dead by his best friends. Hugh's rage drove him to crawl two hundred miles across dangerous territory to seek revenge until he was no longer Hugh Glass but had become Lord Grizzly. "Lord Grizzly" is the second volume of Frederick Manfred's acclaimed five-volume series, The Buckskin Man Tales. For this Bison Books edition, poet Freya Manfred provides a new introduction.