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Wild West
Known as 'Lying George' for his many false strikes, George Washington Carmack and two Indian friends found a real nugget in 1896 that set off a fabled gold rush in Canada....
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American History Magazine
After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States feared that Alaska was vulnerable to invasion. To allay those fears, the government embarked on a monumental job of road building through some of the most remote and...
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Wild West
Jesse Chisholm's trail led from Texas to Abilene, Kansas, and driving a herd of half-wild Longhorns over it was a baptism by fire....
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Wild West
For nearly 150 years, the royally chartered Hudson's Bay Company battled Frenchmen, Canadians, Indians, mixed bloods and Scots for control of the lucrative fur trade in the Great White North....
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Wild West
The Swiss entrepreneur carved out a big place for himself in Mexican California, using area Indians to do most of the hard work....
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Picture of the Day
The government-sponsored transcontinental expedition under the leadership of Captain Meriwether Lewis (right) and Lieutenant William Clark (left) set off down the Ohio River on August 31, 1803. The 40-member expedition wintered and trained...
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Picture of the Day
Housing on the Plains After 1863, settlement on the treeless Great Plains–the area including portions of modern-day Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota and Oklahoma–would have been impossible without the sod house....
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Reviews, Wild West Reviews
The New Encyclopedia of the American West, edited by Howard R. Lamar, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1998, $60. Subscribing to the broadest definition of the American West, this one-volume encyclopedia covers not only the major...
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Reviews, Wild West Reviews
Lewis & Clark: An American Journey, by Daniel B. Thorp, MetroBooks (imprint of Friedman/Fairfax Publishers), New York, 1998, $22.98. For those who like nice illustrations with their history, this 160-page book delivers the goods...
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Reviews, Wild West Reviews
MORT KÜNSTLER PORTRAYS HIS VISION OF THE OLD WEST IN HIS LATEST COLLECTION OF ARTWORK. BY ANN THOMPSON THE DRAMATIC EVENTS that shaped the Wild West–and the extraordinary cast of characters who populated it–have long inspired...
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Reviews, Wild West Reviews
PERILOUS PASSAGE: A NARRATIVE OF THE MONTANA GOLD RUSH New Yorker Edwin Purple, as editor Kenneth N. Owens points out, was not remarkable in what he did or how he wroteabout it (no literary brilliance here, but no purple prose either)....
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Reviews, Wild West Reviews
In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 15281990, by Quintard Taylor, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1998, $29.95. Esteban, a Spanish-speaking slave, survived a November 1528 shipwreck in the Gulf...
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Reviews, Wild West Reviews
Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation, by Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Univ. of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1997, $29.95. “The California Gold Rush,” writes Malcolm Rohrbough, a professor of...
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Reviews, Wild West Reviews
Frontier Children, by Linda Peavy & Ursula Smith, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1999, $24.95. Children should be seen and heard, even those youngsters who lived in the 19th-century West. If the roles played by women on the...
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Reviews, Wild West Reviews
Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, 1850edited by Kenneth L. Holmes,University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1996, $13 paperback. Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, 1851edited...
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Reviews, Wild West Reviews
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West, by Stephen E.Ambrose, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1996, $27.50. No disrespect to William Clark (a good man who needs a good biography of his...