What Was the Wild West? PDF Download

Author: Janet B. Pascal
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399544240
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Saddle up and get ready for a ride back into the wild and wooly past of the American West. The west was at its wildest from 1865 to 1895, when territories west of the Mississippi River remained untamed and lawless. Famous for cowboys, American Indians, lawmen, gunslingers, pioneers, and prospectors, this period in US history captures the imagination of all kids and now is brought vividly to life.

Author: Michael Wallis
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 161312144X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 750

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Book Description
An extensively illustrated day-by-day adventure that tells the stories of pioneers and cowboys, gold rushes, and saloon shoot-outs on America’s frontier. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the lure of land rich in minerals, fertile for farming, and plentiful with buffalo bred an all-out obsession with heading westward. The Wild West: 365 Days takes you back to these booming frontier towns that became the stuff of American legend, breeding characters such as Butch Cassidy and Jesse James. Prize-winning journalist and historian Michael Wallis spins a colorful narrative, separating myth from fact, in 365 vignettes. Learn the stories of Davy Crockett, Wild Bill Hickok, and Annie Oakley; travel to the O.K. Corral and Dodge City; ride with the Pony Express; and witness the invention of the Colt revolver. Included throughout are images drawn from Robert G. McCubbin’s extensive collection of Western memorabilia, encompassing rare books, photographs, ephemera, and artifacts, including Billy the Kid’s knife.

Author: Anita Yasuda
Publisher: Nomad Press
ISBN: 1936749742
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
Explore the Wild West! 25 Great Projects, Activities, Experiments invites young readers ages 6–9 to experience the spirit of the Wild West. Kids learn about explorers who mapped the American West, Native Americans, gold miners, cowboy culture, cattle drives, Wild West legends, frontier towns, peacekeepers, lawbreakers, and much more. Through projects ranging from making a settler’s soddie to mining for gold, kids develop a better understanding of the rich history of the Wild West in the 1800s.

Author: Laura J. Arata
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806168161
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Winner of the Western Writers of America “SPUR Award” and the Western Association of Women Historians “Gita Chaudhuri Prize”! Born a slave in eastern Tennessee, Sarah Blair Bickford (1852–1931) made her way while still a teenager to Montana Territory, where she settled in the mining boomtown of Virginia City. Race and the Wild West is the first full-length biography of this remarkable woman, whose life story affords new insight into race and belonging in the American West around the turn of the twentieth century. For many years, Sarah Bickford’s known biography fit into a single paragraph. By examining her life in all its complexity, Arata fills in what were long believed to be unrecoverable “silent spaces” in her story. Before establishing herself as a successful business owner, we learn, she was twice married, both times to white men. Her first husband, an Irish immigrant, physically abused her until she divorced him in 1881. Their three children all died before the age of ten. In 1883, she married Stephen Bickford and gave birth to four more children. Upon his death, she inherited his shares of the Virginia City Water Company, acquiring sole ownership in 1917. For the final decade of her life, Bickford actively preserved and promoted a historic Virginia City building best known as the site of the brutal lynching in 1864 of five men. Her conspicuous role in developing an early form of heritage tourism challenges long-standing narratives that place white men at the center of the “Wild West” myth and its promotion. Bickford’s story offers a window into the dynamics of race in the rural West. Although her experiences defy easy categorization, what is clear is that her navigation of social norms and racial barriers did not hinge on exceptionalism or tokenism. Instead, she built a life that deserves to be understood on its own terms. Through exhaustive research and nuanced analysis, Laura J. Arata advances our understanding of a woman whose life embodied the contradictory intersections of hope and disappointment that characterized life in the early-twentieth-century American West for brave pioneers of many races.

Author: Joy S. Kasson
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 1466895373
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A fascinating analysis of the first famous American to erase the boundary between real history and entertainment Canada, and Europe. Crowds cheered as cowboys and Indians--and Annie Oakley!--galloped past on spirited horses, sharpshooters exploded glass balls tossed high in the air, and cavalry troops arrived just in time to save a stagecoach from Indian attack. Vivid posters on billboards everywhere made William Cody, the show's originator and star, a world-renowned figure. Joy S. Kasson's important new book traces Cody's rise from scout to international celebrity, and shows how his image was shaped. Publicity stressed his show's "authenticity" yet audiences thrilled to its melodrama; fact and fiction converged in a performance that instantly became part of the American tradition. But how, precisely, did that come about? How, for example, did Cody use his audience's memories of the Civil War and the Indian wars? He boasted that his show included participants in the recent conflicts it presented theatrically, yet he also claimed it evoked "memories" of America's bygone greatness. Kasson's shrewd, engaging study--richly illustrated--in exploring the disappearing boundary between entertainment and public events in American culture, shows us just how we came to imagine our memories.

Author: Terry C. Treadwell
Publisher: Frontline Books
ISBN: 1526782383
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 499

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Book Description
This true crime history of the American Frontier separates fact from fiction with in-depth profiles of thirty-eight career criminals and infamous outlaw gangs. In the years following the American Civil War, the country’s western frontier was home to a prodigious number of myth-making cowboys, infamous gunslingers, saloon madams, and not always law-abiding lawmen. But the romantic mystique of these individuals and the time in which they lives is largely the product of novelists and filmmakers. In Outlaws of the Wild West, Terry Treadwell presents the real stories behind such legends as Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, the Dalton Brothers, and others—as well as their lesser-known but equally criminal peers. Here are the stories of William Clark Quantrill and his Confederate Army unit, Quantrill’s Raiders, who turned hit-and-run raids into a way of life; Henry Starr, the Native American career criminal who went on to play himself in the movie of his life; Ann and Josie Bassett, the sisters who defended their ranch from cattle barons with the help of Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch; and many more.

Author: Robert Edelstein
Publisher: Centennial Books
ISBN: 1951274350
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
For several hundred years, the West had been the land of dreams, an extraordinary region of hope, expansion and opportunity where European countries—and then the young USA itself—sent their finest explorers to plant seeds in a seemingly untapped, open landscape. This spirit captured the popular imagination in the Wild West, those raucous 30 years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of a new century. Within these pages, readers will explore true tales of rebels and heroes such as General George Custer, Buffalo Bill, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Annie Oakley, and Sitting Bull, among others. The Wild West was the American Dream on steroids. It was an age of gunfights and gold rushes, cowboys and Comanches, with the likes of Buffalo Bill, Jesse James and Billy the Kid making their names. It forged extraordinary legends and even bigger lies, with everything fueled by dime novels written back East that encouraged folks to grab their share of a promise that was difficult for this hard land to keep. This book looks at all these mythical characters, the start of the railroad across the nation, the cost it all dealt to the Native Americans whose land was lost, and the way Hollywood still keeps the dream alive. As historian Richard White says, “People could go west and no matter their failures elsewhere, they had an opportunity to remake themselves. It’s a symbol for a kind of individualism that actually doesn’t exist in the West, but mythically it does.”

Author: Terry Lee Anderson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804748544
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Cooperation, not conflict, is emphasized in a study that casts America's frontier history as a place in which local people helped develop the legal framework that tamed the West.

Author: Rose Pender
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803287921
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
The aristocratic Rose Pender and her husband, James, were among the thousands of English travelers in the American West during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This is Pender's lively account of a grand tour in 1883 of Texas, California, Salt Lake City, Wyoming, Dakota Territory, and far-flung points. ø A. B. Guthrie Jr. in his foreword writes that "all students and collectors will want" A Lady's Experiences in the Wild West in 1883. "It deals with a West in transition from frontier to the glimmer of modern times, from open range to fenced pastures, from trails to trains, from makeshift and made-do to more convenient and easier ways. We see it through the eyes and from the sensibilities of a gentlewoman and a Britisher to boot. The woman was indeed a Lady. She brought to America her highborn prejudices and standards. . .and with them a sharp eye, a chatty pen, and a game spirit. . . . She adds to our knowledge of a time no one is old enough to remember."

Author: Frederick Nolan
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
ISBN: 1848585101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
On 14 May 1804, the personal secretary President Thomas Jefferson, one Capt. Meriwether Lewis, and a companion, William Clark, led a thirty-three-man expedition to the new lands of Louisiana, purchased from Napoleon the previous year. 8,000 miles (13,000 km) and two years later, after rafting up the Missouri and crossing the Rocky Mountains, the...