First published in 1926, this entertaining and dramatic biography forever installed outlaw Billy the Kid in the pantheon of mythic heroes from the Old West and is still considered the single most influential portrait of Billy in this century. Saga focuses on the Kid's life and experiences in the bloody war between the Murphy-Dolan and Tunstall-McSween gangs in and around Lincoln, New Mexico, between 1878 and paints the Kid as a boyish Robin Hood or romantic knight galvanised into a life of crime and killing by the war's violence and bloodshed. Billy represented the romantic and anarchic Old West that the march of civilisation was rapidly displacing1881.Burns, his destroyer was Pat Garrett, the courageous sheriff of Lincoln County. Garrett's shooting of Billy in 1881 hastened the closing of the American frontier. Walter Noble Burns's 'Saga of Billy the Kid' kindled a fascination in Billy the Kid that survives to this day. Richard W. Etulain's foreword discusses the singular importance of Saga in the historical literature on Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War.

Even before he was shot and killed in 1881, Billy the Kid's charisma and murderous career were generating stories that belied his brief life - and that only multiplied, growing to legendary proportions after his death at age twenty-one. In Thunder in the West, Richard W. Etulain takes the true measure of Billy, the man and the legend, and presents the clearest picture yet of his life and his ever-shifting place and presence in the cultural landscape of the Old West. Billy the Kid - born Henry McCarty in 1859, and also known as William H. Bonney - emerges from these pages in all his complexity, at once a gentleman and gregarious companion, and a thief and violent murderer. Tapping new depths of research, Etulain traces Billy's short life from his mysterious origins in the East through his wanderings in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. As we move from his peripatetic early years through the wild West to his fatal involvement in the Lincoln County Wars, we see the impressionable boy give way to the conflicted young man and, finally, to the opportunistic and often amoral outlaw who was out for himself, for revenge, and for whatever he could steal along the way. Against this deftly drawn portrait, Etulain considers the stories and myths spawned by Billy's life and death. Beginning with the dime novels featuring Billy the Kid, even during his lifetime, and ranging across the myriad newspaper accounts, novels, and movies that alternately celebrated his outlaw life and condemned his exploits, Etulain offers a uniquely informed view of the changing interpretations that have shaped and reshaped the reputation of this enduring icon of the Old West. In his portrayal, Billy the Kid lives on, not as a cut-throat desperado or a young charmer but as both - hero and villain, myth and man, fully realized in this twenty-first-century interpretation.

Nearing 60, William D. Street (1851-1911) sat down to write his memoir of frontier life. Street's early years on the plains of western Kansas were both ordinary and extraordinary; ordinary in what they reveal about the everyday life of so many who went out to the western frontier, extraordinary in their breadth and depth of historical event and impact. His tales of life as a teamster, cavalryman, town developer, trapper, buffalo hunter, military scout, and cowboy put us squarely in the middle of such storied events as Sheridan's 1868-1869 winter campaign on the southern Plains and the Cheyenne Exodus of 1878. They take us trapping beaver and hunting buffalo for hides and meat, and driving cattle on the Great Western Cattle Trail. They give us insight into his evolving understanding of his multi-decade relationship with the Lakota. And they give us a front-row seat at the founding and development of Jewell and Gaylord, Kansas, and a firsthand look at the formation of Jewell's "Buffalo Militia." In later life Street rose to prominence as a newspaper publisher, state legislator, and regent of the Kansas State Agricultural College. At the time of his death-noted in the New York Times-he was still at work on his memoir. Handed down through his family over the past century and faithfully transcribed here, Street's story of frontier life is as rich in history as it is in character, giving us a sense of what it was to be not just a witness to, but a player in, the drama of the plains as it unfolded in the late nineteenth century. Edited by Street'sgreat-grandson, with an introduction by Richard Etulain, a leading scholar of the West, this memoir is history as it was lived, recalled in sharp detail and recounted in engaging prose, for the ages. Warren R. Street is professor emeritus of psychology at Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington.

The editor and a distinguished group of twelve collaborators re-interpret New Mexico's history through biography. Profiles of fourteen notable, complex characters provide a unique view into New Mexico's development from prehistoric times to the present. Here are lives of men and women that illustrate memorable events: from Pope and the Pueblo Revolt to Spanish colonisers Juan de Onate and Diego de Vargas; from Hispanic widows exercising their property rights to Billy the Kid and the shoot-out in Lincoln; from Mabel Dodge Luhan and her avant-garde, idealistic salon to Senator Dennis Chavez and his exercise of Hispanic political power on a national level. By emphasising the links between important New Mexicans and their times, this book makes history a personal story of drama and pathos played out within a larger context of pivotal events and formative ideas.

Where others saw only sage, a salt lake, and a great desert, the Mormons saw their “lovely Deseret,� a land of lilacs, honeycombs, poplars, and fruit trees. Unwelcome in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, they migrated to the dry lands between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada to establish Mormon country, a wasteland made green. Like the land the Mormons settled, their habits stood in stark contrast to the frenzied recklessness of the American West. Opposed to the often prodigal individualism of the West, Mormons lived in closely knit – some say ironclad – communities. The story of Mormon country is one of self-sacrifice and labor spent in the search for an ideal in the most forbidding territory of the American West. Richard W. Etulain provides a new introduction to this edition.

A Kansas Notable BookNearing 60, William D. Street (1851–1911) sat down to write his memoir of frontier life. Street’s early years on the plains of western Kansas were both ordinary and extraordinary; ordinary in what they reveal about the everyday life of so many who went out to the western frontier, extraordinary in their breadth and depth of historical event and impact. His tales of life as a teamster, cavalryman, town developer, trapper, buffalo hunter, military scout, and cowboy put us squarely in the middle of such storied events as Sheridan’s 1868–1869 winter campaign on the southern Plains and the Cheyenne Exodus of 1878. They take us trapping beaver and hunting buffalo for hides and meat, and driving cattle on the Great Western Cattle Trail. They give us insight into his evolving understanding of his multi-decade relationship with the Lakota. And they give us a front-row seat at the founding and development of Jewell and Gaylord, Kansas, and a firsthand look at the formation of Jewell’s “Buffalo Militia.� In later life Street rose to prominence as a newspaper publisher, state legislator, and regent of the Kansas State Agricultural College. At the time of his death—noted in the New York Times—he was still at work on his memoir. Handed down through his family over the past century and faithfully transcribed here, Street’s story of frontier life is as rich in history as it is in character, giving us a sense of what it was to be not just a witness to, but a player in, the drama of the plains as it unfolded in the late nineteenth century. Edited by Street’s great-grandson, with an introduction by Richard Etulain, a leading scholar of the West, this memoir is history as it was lived, recalled in sharp detail and recounted in engaging prose, for the ages.

A central character in legends and histories of the Old West, Billy the Kid rivals such western icons as Jesse James and General George Armstrong Custer for the number of books and movies his brief, violent life inspired. Billy the Kid: A Reader's Guide introduces readers to the most significant of these written and filmed works. Compiled and written by a respected historian of the Old West and author of a masterful new biography of Billy the Kid, this reader's guide includes summaries and evaluations of biographies, histories, novels, and movies, as well as archival sources and research collections. Surveying newspaper articles, books, pamphlets, essays, and book chapters, Richard W. Etulain traces the shifting views of Billy the Kid from his own era to the present. Etulain's discussion of novels and movies reveals a similar shift, even as it points out both the historical inaccuracies and the literary and cinematic achievements of these works. A brief section on the authentic and supposed photographs of the Kid demonstrates the difficulties specialists and collectors have encountered in locating dependable photographic sources. This discerning overview will guide readers through the plethora of words and images generated by Billy the Kid's life and legend over more than a century. It will prove invaluable to those interested in the demigods of the Old West-and in the ever-changing cultural landscape in which they appear to us.

The history of the American West is full of intriguing life stories, and the fifteen essays in this collection weave a selection of those lives together to focus on the main currents in the regionas history. The first five essays cover the period from contact to the mid-nineteenth century and feature Indian leaders and Spanish colonizers, characters from the Mexican period, explorers, mountain men, and missionaries. Familiar names in this portion are Juan Bautista de Anza, Stephen F. Austin, Dona Tules, Lewis and Clark, Jedediah Smith, and Narcissa Whitman.

The second group of essays reflects on Mormons, miners, California Hispanics, American Indians, ranchers, farmers, and the Wild West of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley. The essays on the twentieth-century West examine the careers of James J. Hill, John Muir, Jeannette Rankin, Aimee Semple McPherson, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Walt Disney, CA(c)sar ChAvez, Barbara Jordan, Microsoftas Paul Allen, and the mythical figure of Rosie the Riveter.

"The Contributors"
Carl Abbott is professor of urban studies and planning at Portland (Oregon) State University.
Katherine G. Aiken is professor and chair of the department of history, University of Idaho.
Gary Clayton Anderson is professor of history, University of Oklahoma.
Barton H. Barbour is assistant professor of history, Boise State University.
Cheryl J. Foote teaches history at TVI Community College, Albuquerque.
Mark S. Foster is professor of history, University of Colorado, Denver.
Richard Griswold del Castillo is chair of the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department, San Diego State University.
Mark W. T. Harvey is associate professor of history, North DakotaState University, Fargo.
Jon Hunner directs the program in public history, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces.
R. Douglas Hurt is chair of the history department, Purdue University.
Anne F. Hyde is professor of history, Colorado College, Colorado Springs.
John L. Kessell is professor emeritus of history, University of New Mexico, and founding editor of the six-volume Vargas Series (UNM Press).
William L. Lang is professor of history and former director of the Center for Columbia River History, Portland State University.
Glenda Riley is Alexander M. Bracken Professor Emeritus of History, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana.
Elliott West is Distinguished Professor of History, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

Charlie Siringo (1855-1928) lived the quintessential life of adventure on the American frontier as a cowboy, Pinkerton detective, writer, and later as a consultant for early western films. Siringo was one of the most attractive, bold, and original characters to live and flourish in the final decades of the Wild West. His love of the cattle business and of cowboy life were so great that in 1885 he published A Texas Cowboy, or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony--Taken From Real Life, which Will Rogers dubbed the "Cowboy's Bible." Howard R. Lamar's biography deftly shares Siringo's story within seventy-five pivotal years of western history. Siringo was not a mere observer but a participant in major historical events including the Coeur d'Alene mining strikes of the 1890s and Big Bill Haywood's trial in 1907. Lamar focuses on Siringo's youthful struggles to employ his abundant athleticism and ambitions and how Siringo's varied experiences helped develop the compelling national myth of the cowboy.

Western fans today may not recognize the name Ernest Haycox (1899-1950), but they know his work. John Ford turned one of his stories into the iconic film Stagecoach, and the whole Western literary genre still follows conventions that Haycox deftly mastered and reshaped. In this new book about Haycox's literary career, Richard W. Etulain tells the engrossing story of his rise through the ranks of popular magazine and serial fiction to become one of the Western's most successful creators. After graduating from the University of Oregon in 1923 with a degree in journalism, Haycox began his quest to break into New York's pulp magazine scene, submitting dozens of stories before he began to make a living from his writing. By the end of the 1920s he had become a top writer for Western Story, Short Stories, and Adventure, among other popular weeklies and monthlies. Ernest Haycox and the Western traces Haycox's path from rank beginner, to crack pulp writer, to regular contributor to Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. Etulain shows how Haycox experimented with techniques to deepen and broaden his Westerns, creating more introspective protagonists (Hamlet heroes), introducing new types of heroines (the brunette vixen, the blonde Puritan), and weaving greater historical realism into his plots. After reaching the height of success with his best-selling Custer novel, Bugles in the Afternoon (1944), Haycox moved away from the financially rewarding but artistically constricting Western formula - only to achieve his final coup with The Earthbreakers, a historical novel about the end of the Oregon Trail, published posthumously in 1952. Reconstructing the career of a popular literary giant, Ernest Haycox and the Western restores Haycox to his rightful place in the history of Western literature.

Generations of Americans have seen the West as beyond federal control and direction. But the national government's presence in the West dates to before Lewis and Clark, and since 1789 a number of U.S. presidents have had a penetrating and long-lasting impact on the region. In Presidents Who Shaped the American West, noted historians Glenda Riley and Richard W. Etulain present startling analyses of chief executives and their policies, illuminating the long reach of presidential power. The authors begin each chapter by sketching a particular president's biography and explaining the political context in which he operated while in office. They then consider overarching actions and policies that affected both the nation and the region during the president's administration, such as Thomas Jefferson's augmentation of the West via the Louisiana Purchase, and Andrew Jackson's removal of American Indians from the Southeast to ""Indian Country"" in the West. Abraham Lincoln's promotion of the Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad, and western territories and states free of slavery marked further extensions of presidential power in the region. Theodore Roosevelt's conservation efforts and Jimmy Carter's expansion of earlier policies reflected growing public concern with the West's finite natural resources and fragile natural environment. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Dwight D. Eisenhower's highway program, and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society funneled federal funding into the West. In return for this largesse, some argued, the West paid the price of increased federal hegemony, and Ronald Reagan's presidency arguably curbed that power. Riley and Etulain also discuss the most recent presidential terms and the region's growing political power in Congress and the federal bureaucracy. With an accessible approach, Presidents Who Shaped the American West establishes the crucial and formative nature of the relationship between the White House and the West - and will encourage readers to continue examining this relationship.

Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine. Before Calamity Jane became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared under a landslide of purple prose. Calamity became a hostess and dancer in Deadwood's saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn't get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could filmmakers. Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian Richard W. Etulain's account begins with a biography that offers new information on Calamity's several 'husbands' (including one she legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the stories that have shaped Calamity Jane's reputation. Some Calamity portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a husband and family. As the 2004 - 2006 HBO series Deadwood makes clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on - raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever.

In a career in public office spanning five decades, Mark Odom Hatfield (1922-2011) never lost an election. First elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1950, he retired from political office in 1997 after serving as Oregon state senator, secretary of state, and governor and as United States senator for five terms. He was arguably the state's most important politician, but his brand of liberal-to-moderate Republicanism has long since vanished from the political stage. Mark O. Hatfield: Oregon Statesman tells Hatfield's story-as an Oregonian, a politician, and a man of practical vision, deep convictions, and far-reaching consequence in the civic life of the state and the nation. A lifelong evangelical Christian and Republican-per his mother's fondest wishes-and politically inclined from a young age, Hatfield came to office after studying and teaching political science and observing firsthand the ravages of war in the Pacific and the cruelty of segregation at home. Historian Richard W. Etulain portrays Hatfield as an energetic young Republican legislator in a state becoming increasingly Democratic. He pushed civil rights legislation, supported laborers as well as business interests, and struck a balance that would align him with moderates even as the party's conservative wing became ascendant. Elected in 1958 as Oregon's youngest-ever governor, Hatfield went on to become the first in the twentieth century to hold that office for two terms, using his tenure to streamline the state's executive branch and promote Oregon as a prime destination for business and tourism-efforts that quickly earned him a place on the national stage. Etulain focuses on Hatfield as a force in Oregon state politics but also examines his long tenure as a U.S. senator, garnering attention early for his stance against the Vietnam War and later for his antinuclear position. The private life, the public figure, the man of faith and family, of an older West and the new: this biography, while compact, captures Mark Hatfield in full, as a major western politician of the twentieth century.

Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine.
Before Calamity Jane became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared under a landslide of purple prose.
Calamity became a hostess and dancer in Deadwood's saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn't get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could filmmakers.
Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian Richard W. Etulain's account begins with a biography that offers new information on Calamity's several "husbands" (including one she legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the stories that have shaped Calamity Jane's reputation. Some Calamity portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a husband and family. As the 2004-2006 HBO series "Deadwood" makes clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on--raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever.""

Set in Oregon in the early years of the twentieth century, H. L. Davis's Honey in the Horn chronicles the struggles faced by homesteaders as they attempted to settle down and eke out subsistence from a still-wild land. With sly humor and keenly observed detail, Davis pays homage to the indomitable character of Oregon's restless people and dramatic landscapes without romanticizing or burnishing the myths. Clay Calvert, an orphan, works as a hand on a sheep ranch until he stumbles into trouble and is forced to flee. Journeying throughout the state, from the lush coastal forests, to the Columbia Gorge, to the golden wheat fields east of the Cascades, he encounters a cast of characters as rich and diverse as the land, including a native Tunne boy and a beautiful girl named Luce. Originally published in 1935, Honey in the Horn reveals as much about the prevailing attitudes and beliefs during H. L. Davis's lifetime as it does about the earlier era in which it is set. It transcends the limitations of its time through the sheer power and beauty of Davis's prose. Full of humor and humanity, Davis's first novel displays a vast knowledge of Pacific Northwest history, lore, and landscape. The only Oregon book that has ever won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this classic coming-of-age novel has been called the "Huckleberry Finn of the West." With a new introduction by Richard W. Etulain, this important work from one of Oregon's premier authors is once again available for a new generation.

A central character in legends and histories of the Old West, Billy the Kid rivals such western icons as Jesse James and General George Armstrong Custer for the number of books and movies his brief, violent life inspired. Billy the Kid: A Reader's Guide introduces readers to the most significant of these written and filmed works. Compiled and written by a respected historian of the Old West and author of a masterful new biography of Billy the Kid, this reader's guide includes summaries and evaluations of biographies, histories, novels, and movies, as well as archival sources and research collections. Surveying newspaper articles, books, pamphlets, essays, and book chapters, Richard W. Etulain traces the shifting views of Billy the Kid from his own era to the present. Etulain's discussion of novels and movies reveals a similar shift, even as it points out both the historical inaccuracies and the literary and cinematic achievements of these works. A brief section on the authentic and supposed photographs of the Kid demonstrates the difficulties specialists and collectors have encountered in locating dependable photographic sources. This discerning overview will guide readers through the plethora of words and images generated by Billy the Kid's life and legend over more than a century. It will prove invaluable to those interested in the demigods of the Old West - and in the ever-changing cultural landscape in which they appear to us.

"The American We"st is the only book-length historical overview of the post-1900 American West. This balanced, comprehensive account of the modern West skillfully delineates the changes and resulting complexities that characterize the twentieth-century West. The authors consider the ways in which urban, service, and computer-related industries have replaced rural, extractive, and agricultural economies. They also trace the steps by which western politics shifted from New Deal principles to more conservative, Republican policies. The book examines the roles of racial and ethnic groups in the recent West, emphasizing the challenges facing Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans in the region. Other chapters discuss western women, families, and urban developments. Thorough coverage of cultural topics--literature, art, films, religion, and education--includes lively descriptions of important individuals and memorable events. This Bison Books edition, which features a new chapter covering the mid-1980s to 2005 and bibliographic essays on books about the modern American West, offers the most up-to-date discussion of the contemporary American West available.

What has the western of literature and film contributed to American culture? Richard Etulain, the leading cultural historian of the West, answers that question by tracing four distinct storytelling traditions and exploring the indelible images each has left in the public's mind over the past 125 years. Our images of cowboys, lawmen, outlaws, and Indians come from a collage of sources, including Buffalo Bill, Frederick Jackson Turner, Calamity Jane, Mary Hallock Foote, Geronimo, Mourning Dove, Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Walter Noble Burns, John Ford, Louis L'Amour, Wallace Stegner, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Larry McMurtry.

Etulain begins with the dominant image conveyed in Wild West shows and dime novels of the late nineteenth centuryAAA1/2the West as a place of adventure and danger. In the early twentieth century stories by women and Indians appeared, but they were soon overlooked and not rediscovered until the 1970s. The period from the 1920s to the 1950s represents the classic era of western movies and novels--of cavalry charges to save the day and heroes in white hats. But since the 1960s a counter story has emerged, one of ambiguity and complexity that often turned upside down our notions about what really mattered in how we look at the West.

Etulain carefully explores why stories of the frontier and American West still rival those of the American Civil War as the country's most popular tales, and he shows how narratives that persisted relatively unchanged for a century have moved in notable new directions since the 1960s.

Distinguished historian Richard W. Etulain brings together a generous selection of essays from his sixty-year career as a specialist on the US West in this essential volume. Each essay provides an invaluable overview of the rise of western literary history and historiography--including insightful evaluations of individual historians--revealing summaries of regional literature and discussions of western stories yet to be told. Together these writings furnish readers with useful considerations of important subjects about the American West. All those interested in the American West and its interpreters will find these illuminative moments of literary history and historiography especially appealing.

This exhaustive bibliographical reference will be the first stop for anyone looking for Calamity Jane in print, film, or photograph - and wanting to know how reliable those sources may be. Richard W. Etulain, renowned western-U.S. historian and the author of a recent biography of this charismatic figure, enumerates and assesses the most valuable sources on Calamity Jane's life and legend in newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and movies, as well as historical and government archives. Etulain begins with a brief biography of Martha Canary, aka Calamity Jane (1856-1903), then analyzes the origins and growth of her legends. The sources, Etulain shows, reveal three versions of Calamity Jane. In the most popular one, she was a Wild Woman of the Old West who helped push a roaring frontier through its final stages. This is the Calamity Jane who fought Indians, marched with the military, and took on the bad guys. Early in her life she also hoped to embody the pioneer woman, seeking marriage and a stable family and home. A third, later version made of Calamity an angel of mercy who reached out to the poor and nursed smallpox victims no one else would help. The hyperbolic journalism of the Old West, as well as dime novels and the stretchers Calamity herself told in her interviews and autobiography, shaped her legends through much of the twentieth century. Many of the sensational early accounts of Calamity's life, Etulain notes, were based on rumor and hearsay. In illuminating the role of the Deadwood Dick dime novel series and other pulp fiction in shaping what we know - or think we know - of the American West, Etulain underscores one of his fascinating themes: the power of popular culture. The product of twenty years' labor sifting fact from falsehood or distortion, this bibliography and reader's guide includes brief discussions of nearly every item's contents, along with a terse, entertaining evaluation of its reliability.

This new historical overview tells the dramatic story of the American West from its prehistory to the present. A narrative history, it covers the region from the North Dakota-to-Texas states to the Pacific Coast. This West has always been home to richly diverse cultural groups, including today's growing numbers of Indian, Hispanic, and Asian Americans. Other distinctions have marked the Western past: first, the differences among prehistoric peoples and among hundreds of Indian tribes at first white contact; next, the varied western subcultures that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; third the social, cultural, and political complexities of the West in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In ""Beyond the Missouri"", Richard Etulain provides a fresh, balanced narrative of this geographically and culturally vast area and emphasises two themes: change and complexity. His perspective is neither the too-optimistic, homogenised position of the Turnerian school of historians nor the less optimistic, conflicted approach of the Revisionist Western historians. Etulain begins his study with a discussion of western landscapes and Native inhabitants. He next examines the Spanish Southwest, colonial rivalries, mountain men, missionaries, and the Oregon Trail. Then Etulain looks at Mormons, miners, western communities, ranching and farming, and transportation networks. He treats western frontier social patterns and cultures and contributes several chapters on the modern West, including the pre-World War II and the Cold War Wests. Etulain concludes with today's continuing search for an American West. Each of the fifteen chapters contains a helpful list of suggested readings.

This second book in the Notable Westerners Series highlights ten lawmen and gunfighters, men and women who shaped the American west.

Wallace Stegner, a major American novelist and conservationist, is interviewed by Etulain, a renowned Western scholar, in a series of discussions. Originally published in 1983 and entitled Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature, this book is the ultimate Stegner interview. New foreword by Stewart Udall.

This volume explores Abraham Lincoln’s ties to the American West, bringing together a variety of scholars and experts who offer a look at the sixteenth president’s legacy in the territory beyond the Mississippi River. Included in this collection are an examination of Lincoln’s opposition to the Mexican War; a discussion of antislavery politics as applied to the West; perspectives on Lincoln’s views on the Thirteenth Amendment and his reluctance to admit Nevada to the Union; a look at the impact of the Radical Republicans on Lincoln’s patronage and appointments; and discussion of Lincoln’s favorable treatment of New Mexico and Arizona in an effort to garner their loyalty to the Union. Also analyzed is “The Tribe of Abraham�—Lincoln’s less-than-competent appointments in Washington Territory—and the ways in which Lincoln’s political friends in the Western Territories influenced his western policies. Other essays look at Lincoln’s dealings with the Mormons of Utah, who supported the president in exchange for his tolerance, and Native Americans, whose relations with the government suffered as the president’s attention was consumed by the Civil War. Loaded with a wealth of information, Lincoln Looks West explores yet another dimension to this dynamic leader and to the history of the American West.