Forming the most important river corridor in the trans-Mississippi West, the Missouri and its navigable tributaries were instrumental in opening the continent-but it took the steamboat to make that possible. The flat-bottomed vessel was the technological marvel of its day and provided access to the West before the railroads' arrival, encouraging ......
In An Apache Nightmare, Charles Collins tells the story of the Battle at Cibecue Creek, a pivotal event in the Apache Wars. On August 28, 1881, Col. Eugene Asa Carr left Fort Apache, Arizona Territory, with two cavalry troops and a company of Indian scouts. Their aim was to arrest a Cibecue Apache medicine man, Nock-ay-det-klinne, rumored to be ......
The first woman anthropologist to work in the Southwest, Matilda Coxe Stevenson (1849-1915) helped define the contours of anthropological research at the turn of the twentieth century. In this first book-length biography of Stevenson, Darlis A. Miller challenges older interpretations of her subject's life and work as she traces one woman's quest ......
Historians have long assumed that ethnic and racial divisions in post-Civil War America were reflected in the U.S. Army, of whose enlistees 40 percent were foreign-born. Now Kevin Adams shows that the frontier army was characterized by a "Victorian class divide" that overshadowed ethnic prejudices.Class and Race in the Frontier Army marks the ......
Prostitution, gambling, and saloons were a vital, if not universally welcome, part of life in frontier boomtowns. In Saloons, Prostitutes, and Temperance in Alaska Territory, Catherine Holder Spude explores the rise and fall of these enterprises in Skagway, Alaska, between the gold rush of 1897 and the enactment of Prohibition in 1918. Her gritty ......
Mountain Men were the principal figures of the fur trade era, one of the most interesting, dramatic, and truly significant phases of the history of the American trans-Mississippi West during the first half of the 19th Century. These men were of all types-some were fugitives from law and civilization, others were the best in rugged manhood; some ......
A soldier and statesman for the ages, the Duke of Wellington is a towering figure in world history. John Severn now offers a fresh look at the man born Arthur Wellesley to show that his career was very much a family affair, a lifelong series of interactions with his brothers and their common Anglo-Irish heritage. The untold story of a great family ......
Surveying the United States-Mexico Boundary along the Rio Grande, 1852 and 1853
The 1848 treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War described a boundary between the two countries that was to be ascertained by a joint boundary commission effort. The section of the boundary along the Rio Grande from Presidio to the mouth of the Pecos River was arguably the most challenging, and it was surveyed by two ......
Few cities are so dramatically identified with their environment as San Francisco-the landscape of hills, the expansive bay, the engulfing fog, and even the deadly fault line shifting below. Yet most residents think of the city itself as separate from the natural environment on which it depends. In Our Better Nature, Philip J. Dreyfus recounts the ......
