The many roles played by guns in the old West with personal accounts by many early settlers and hundreds of photos.

From Buffalo Bill to Wild Bill and from Chief Joseph to Geronimo, the most famous guns in the West and the history behind them More than a few of the actual guns once in the hands of the heroes and villains of America’s Old West still exist, housed in a dozen museums across the country—from the Model 1866 .44-40 that Chief Joseph famously surrendered to General Miles to Wild Bill Hickok’s Colt Model 1851 revolvers; from Buffalo Bill’s .50 caliber breechloading needlegun nicknamed “Lucrezia Borgia” to John Wesley Hardin’s 1860 model .44 SA revolvers. Famous Firearms of the Old West follows the life stories of a dozen actual pistols, rifles, and shotguns instrumental in shaping America’s history—using them as entrées into the lives of the shooters themselves. This is a vivid portrait of famous Western characters, paired with the guns they used to make themselves famous or, as the case may be, infamous. It is a must for anyone interested in the history and lore of the Wild West, gun hobbyists, and tourists seeking a museum experience with a difference.

Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic Plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were for centuries at the center of the North American universe. We know of them mostly because Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them, but why don't we know more? Who were they really? In this extraordinary book, Elizabeth A. Fenn retrieves their history by piecing together important new discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science. Her boldly original interpretation of these diverse research findings offers us a new perspective on early American history, a new interpretation of the American past. By 1500, more than twelve thousand Mandans were established on the northern Plains, and their commercial prowess, agricultural skills, and reputation for hospitality became famous. Recent archaeological discoveries show how these Native American people thrived, and then how they collapsed. The damage wrought by imported diseases like smallpox and the havoc caused by the arrival of horses and steamboats were tragic for the Mandans, yet, as Fenn makes clear, their sense of themselves as a people with distinctive traditions endured. A riveting account of Mandan history, landscapes, and people, Fenn's narrative is enriched and enlivened not only by science and research but by her own encounters at the heart of the world.

The sheriff was a violent, crooked man. He traded - in death, and always showed a profit. His mine in the Arizona hills was a kind of hell on earth, guarded by hard­bitten desperadoes. All around lurked the deadly Apache, as lethal and quick to strike as rattlers. Somewhere in the mine was McAllister's friend. He had to be busted loose before it was too late. McAllister, armed with his gun and his iron nerves, smashed in... Another rapid-fire Rem McAllister adventure from the master of authentic Western excitement, Matt Chisholm.

Firearms have been studied by imperial historians mainly as means of human destruction and material production. Yet firearms have always been invested with a whole array of additional social and symbolical meanings. By placing these meanings at the centre of analysis, the essays presented in this volume extend the study of the gun beyond the confines of military history and the examination of its impact on specific colonial encounters. By bringing cultural perspectives to bear on this most pervasive of technological artefacts, the contributors explore the densely interwoven relationships between firearms and broad processes of social change. In so doing, they contribute to a fuller understanding of some of the most significant consequences of British and American imperial expansions. Not the least original feature of the book is its global frame of reference. Bringing together historians of different periods and regions, A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire overcomes traditional compartmentalisations of historical knowledge and encourages the drawing of novel and illuminating comparisons across time and space.

How did efforts to control wild animals affect colonization? Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL From the time Europeans first came to the New World until the closing of the frontier, the benefits of abundant wild animals—from beavers and wolves to fish, deer, and bison—appeared as a recurring theme in colonizing discourses. Explorers, travelers, surveyors, naturalists, and other promoters routinely advertised the richness of the American faunal environment and speculated about the ways in which animals could be made to serve their colonial projects. In practice, however, American animals proved far less malleable to colonizers’ designs. Their behaviors constrained an English colonial vision of a reinvented and rationalized American landscape. In Wild by Nature, Andrea L. Smalley argues that Anglo-American authorities’ unceasing efforts to convert indigenous beasts into colonized creatures frequently produced unsettling results that threatened colonizers’ control over the land and the people. Not simply acted upon by being commodified, harvested, and exterminated, wild animals were active subjects in the colonial story, altering its outcome in unanticipated ways. These creatures became legal actors—subjects of statutes, issues in court cases, and parties to treaties—in a centuries-long colonizing process that was reenacted on successive wild animal frontiers. Following a trail of human–animal encounters from the seventeenth-century Chesapeake to the Civil War–era southern plains, Smalley shows how wild beasts and their human pursuers repeatedly transgressed the lines lawmakers drew to demarcate colonial sovereignty and control, confounding attempts to enclose both people and animals inside a legal frame. She also explores how, to possess the land, colonizers had to find new ways to contain animals without destroying the wildness that made those creatures valuable to English settler societies in the first place. Offering fresh perspectives on colonial, legal, environmental, and Native American history, Wild by Nature reenvisions the familiar stories of early America as animal tales.

There was room enough in the valley, but Ike Quarles didn’t think so. Now he and his hired killers had served notice on Brad—drift or die! “I’m about through drifting,” Brad said slowly. “I was thinking about taking up a homestead.” Then he was silent, watching them sit their horses, waiting for the abrupt twitch of a hand—the sudden, lunging move that would explode this whole valley into murderous, bullet-screaming range war!

Gunslingers and greed make dangerous bedfellows in this hoof-pounding Western adventure from the USA Today bestselling author of Gunsight Crossing. Young Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves became blood brothers on the day the rancher’s son saved the warrior’s life, forging a bond no one could ever break. And as years passed, a legend grew of the Cheyenne and the white man who rode together—and who could jerk killing iron with the best of them . . . Gunsmoke and Gold In Dale, Colorado, any cowboy with good sense knows better than to step through the batwings of the Plowshare Saloon—and any sheep-herder crazy enough to belly up to the bar at the Red Dog is ordering the last taste of whiskey he’ll ever lift to his lips. The town of Dale is heading for an all-out war that will pit father against son, and brother against brother. Bodine and Two Wolves try to make both sides see reason, but that fails when a bunch of hired night riders start scouring the countryside and putting notches on their six-guns. The blood brothers soon figure the cause of the trouble goes a hell of a lot deeper than the grass everyone’s fighting over. A battle’s coming, and they’re about to be caught in the thick of it—and in a storm of red-hot lead . . . Praise for the novels of William W. Johnstone “[A] rousing, two-fisted saga of the growing American frontier.”—Publishers Weekly on Eyes of Eagles “There’s plenty of gunplay and fast-paced action.”—Curled Up with a Good Book on Dead Before Sundown

Throughout the length and breadth of the sun-bleached cow town of Mescal, Arizona, seethes an undercurrent of suppressed excitement. In front of the town’s blacksmith shop a group of Mormon homesteaders gather about their potential leader, Webb Nichols, in grave discussion. In a lodge room the special meeting of the Magdalena Stockmen’s Association, comprising the big cow outfits of the county, has turned into a deluge of hot words and very pointed accusations. Is the long conflict between the homesteaders and the big outfits about to flare into violence again? For years this particular part of Arizona has been a rustler’s paradise. And as long as homesteaders like Webb Nichols and Shad Caney cover up for the rustlers, the notorious Steve Jennings among them, they’re asking for trouble from the big cattlemen. The Association decides to bring matters to a head by calling in Clay Roberts, a lone wolfer stock-detective with a reputation for getting results. “It don’t seem like one man could make much hell for us,’’ says Webb Nichols, but in that thought Webb, as he is soon to discover, couldn’t be more wrong. Clay Roberts has a couple of strikes on him from the beginning in Deputy Sheriff Dufors, a weak and embittered tool of the homesteaders, and in Webb and Shad, whose bitter, unreasoning feud is carried on by their children during school hours. These youthful hatreds make life miserable for the pretty new teacher, Eudora Stoddard, who is startled one day to find herself sheltering the head of the rustlers, Steve Jennings. From then on matters get tougher by the minute. Men who should be seeing eye to eye regard one another with cold hostility, the grisly episode at Parley Scott’s takes place, the rustlers move in on one of the big cowmen and Clay heads for the hills in deadly pursuit, only to find himself forced to save the life of the dangerous rustler he is hired to capture. And that is only the beginning of new trouble for the fearless stock-detective, the cattlemen, and pretty Eudora Stoddard, whom Clay had hoped to make his wife.