During the winter of 1846-1847, members of the Donner Party found themselves stuck in the snows of the Sierra Nevada on their journey to California, losing many in their group to severe cold and starvation. Those who survived did so by cannibalizing their dead comrades. Today the Donner Party may be the most famous of American overland emigrant ......
In this timely work, Eric Freyfogle probes the long-simmering struggles in the American West to address water-related problem. The big challenge is to resolve water shortages and meet high-valued water needs while also improving river ecosystems. These water conflicts, he suggests, have less to do with our contentious political differences than ......
The Grassroots Movement that Stopped Natural Gas Development
In late 2012, crowds gathered to hear a long anticipated announcement: The Trust for Public Land had prevented natural gas development in the remote Hoback Basin of Wyoming by buying the leases owned by Plains Exploration Company. This would not have happened without the extraordinary will and expertise of local citizens. Unchallenged, the ......
If you had traveled from one community to another inthe prehistoric Southwest, you would have observedtremendous diversity in how people looked and spoke.This volume is the first to look at how prehistoricpeople's appearance and speech conveyed their identities.Southwest archaeologists have previously studied identityusing architecture, ceramics, ......
Life in Small Adobe Homes in Salt Lake City, 1850-1897
Stories of the ordinary people who helped build Salt Lake City emerge from a study of their often humble adobe houses. Rather than focusing on men and women in positions of power and influence, the emphasis here is on the lives of people who built their sturdy, simple homes from mud. A Modest Homestead provides architectural descriptions of ......
The Protohistoric Non-Pueblo World in the American Southwest
Trending upward as an archaeological field of study, protohistoric mobile groups provide fascinating new directions for cutting-edge research in the American Southwest and beyond. These mobile residents represent the ancient and ancestral roots of many modern indigenous peoples, including the Apaches, Jumano, Yavapai, and Ute. These important ......
Family history, usually destined or even designed for limited consumption, is a familiar genre within Mormon culture. Mostly written with little attention to standards of historical scholarship, such works are a distinctly hagiographic form of family memorabilia.But in the right hands, many family sagas can prove widely engaging, owing to inherent ......
This publication presents the first volume (Las Vegas) of the early ethnographic field work of anthropologist Isabel T. Kelly. From 1932 to 1934, Kelly interviewed thirty Southern Paiute people- from southeastern California, southern Nevada, northern Arizona, and southern Utah- about "the old ways." She filled 31 notebooks, made maps, took ......
The Rise and Fall of Commercial Abalone Fishing in California
In the 1800s, when California was captivated by gold fever, a small group of Chinese immigrants recognized the fortune to be made from the untapped resources along the Pacific coast, particularly from harvesting the black abalone of southern and Baja California. These immigrants, with skills from humble beginnings in a traditional Chinese fishing ......
