Wyoming Books

Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park

Lee Whittlesey

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 46 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Morbidly Interesting, and a Personal Note 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

The last decade has seen a slew of books dealing with deaths in the national parks. The authors assure us that they publish these volumes to warn visitors of the dangers they face in the parks. The reality of course is that many in the literate public are fascinated by death, especially in unusual or exotic circumstances, and these books cater to that morbid demand. Nonetheless, they make for interesting reading and serve as a cautious reminder that visits to the wilderness, while safer than certain neighborhoods in major metropolitan areas, still contain very real hazards. This volume by Lee Whittlesey, was one of the first in this genre, and is still one of the best.

From grizzly attacks to death by poisonous gasses and murders, Whittlesey exhaustively covers all known deaths in Yellowstone from before the founding of the park to 1995 when the book was published. For me the descriptions of people falling into the hot springs were by far the most riveting, and the most grusome, portions of the book. Cooked alive, the victims of these accidents rarely died quickly, but often instead lingered on for many hours, a pretty horrific way to go. Whittlesey also catalogs the many mistakes victims and some lucky survivors made to help visitors to the park avoid similar fates.

One thing that sets this book apart from others in this genre is that Whittlesey, in addition to experience as a park tour guide and ranger, is a lawyer. This background shows itself in various ways. The book includes, for example, extensive discussion of court cases that resulted from fatalities in Yellowstone and how they have influenced park management. It also shows in the author's broader philosophy about the deaths in the park. True accidents, he argues, are rare. For the most part, people who have died in the parks were, he argues, actually negligent when it came to their own safety and sometimes the safety of others. This attitude towards the victims shows itself throughout the book, and most of the time Whittlesey makes a pretty convincing case.

But not always. When discussing the 1986 death of William Tesinsky (by mauling from a grizzly bear) Whittlesey notes, "Bear 59 was a semi habituated bear, ... But she had never even approached a human aggressively." This is not entirely true. I should know, because I was chased by Bear 59 on June 20 of that very year while hiking (alone) between the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River and Yellowstone Lake. Indeed, it was my report to the Lake ranger station that led to the temporary closure of that trail, and the bear's eventual relocation by the Park Service. At that time, Bear 59 had two cubs and a large person walking nearby was, as the ranger explained to me, considered a threat. But 59 no longer had the cubs with her when she killed and partially ate the unfortunate Mr. Tesinsky. No doubt, as Whittlesey says, he was too close for 59's liking while trying to get the perfect photograph. But the retelling of this story, that follows the park's official report which I saw a few years later, is interesting in that it does not mention my earlier encounter with 59. Whittlesey the lawyer argues that, much as we don't want to admit it, negligence is more common than accident. He forgot to add that humans, including park rangers, might sometimes unintentionally omit certain bits of information that do not fit their preconceived notions.

(I asked a ranger about what had become of my incident report during a 1998 visit to the park. She said that it had not been included since the bear had not actually come into physical contact with me. I understand that answer, but it certainly does undermine the claim the bear had never before shown aggressive tendencies. In my case, I was unaware of her existence till I saw her charge out of the woods, two cubs at her heals, and easily 50 yards away.)

Editorial Review:

Intriguing stories of how people have died in Yellowstone warn about the many dangers that exist there and in wild areas in general.

Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed: The Struggle for the Powder River Country in 1866 and the Making of the Fetterman Myth

John H. Monnett

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Powder River country of what is now north central Wyoming was one of the most resource-rich regions of the northern plains in the nineteenth century. As U.S. mining interests and white settlement to the north in Montana Territory increased, conflict arose between the United States and the Lakota and Cheyenne nations. On December 21, 1866, the struggle climaxed when a well-organized force of Lakota, Northern Cheyennes, and Arapahos attacked and destroyed a detachment of forty-nine infantrymen and three officers of the 18th Infantry, twenty-seven troopers of the 2nd Cavalry, and two civilians under the command of Captain William Judd Fetterman near Fort Phil Kearny. The Battle of Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed or Hundred in the Hand, as the event is still called, was the worst defeat the U.S. Army had suffered in the Great Plains, only to be exceeded by the Battle of Little Big Horn a decade later.

Because none of the soldiers lived to tell what happened, the Fetterman fight has fostered a body of myth and speculation. In this study, John H. Monnett provides a groundbreaking examination of the conflicts that ensued in the Powder River Country during the nineteenth century and clarifies events and personalities that have become distorted in the annals of Western history. Monnett examines military interests as well as the geopolitical importance of the area and takes into account the environmental history of the conflict as it relates to hunting ranges, vital wood and water resources, and access to trade avenues.

Letters of a Woman Homesteader

Elinore Pruitt Stewart

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

I can't put it down! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Dear fellow Book-lovers:
I found this little gem at the local library today and I can't put it down. It is so good--easy to read (perfect for a busy Mom of 5 like me), inspiring, wholesome, funny, and informative. I am fascinated with this woman: her love for people, her giving heart, and her passion for fun and for life. I'm only on page 81 (out of 282) but I can already sit here and tell you to buy this book and enjoy it! I'm buying myself a copy and also one for my best friend. Christmas is coming!

Pioneer grit 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Genuine substance and sincerity describe Stewart's letters from the early twentieth century while homesteading in this remote corner of Wyoming. Whereas most women would not even consider putting down roots in such an isolated area, Mrs. Stewart was determined to make a life for herself in this territory. And she did just that. It took a special kind of person to live in this far-removed landscape.

Her writing, subject matter and approach to life were most admirable. Hard working and always enthusiastic for adventure, she writes of various encounters with surrounding neighbors and experiences into the countryside. If she had any dull moments on the ranch they must have been few and far between.

Very optimistic about life, Mrs. Stewart affirms, "...all my own efforts have always been just to make the best of everything and to take things as they come."
To further quote, "It has always been a theory of mine that when we become sorry for ourselves we make our misfortunes harder to bear, because we lose courage and can't think without bias."

A wonderful read furthering an appreciation for life in the homesteading era.

Editorial Review:

"Peopled with the kinds of characters most novelists only dream of"(Christian Science Monitor), this classic account of American frontier living captures the rambunctious spirit of a pioneer who set out in 1909 to prove that a woman could ranch. Stewart's captivating missives from her homestead in Wyoming bring to full life the beauty, isolation, and joys of working the prairie.

I See by Your Outfit: Historic Cowboy Gear of the Northern Plains

Tom Lindmier, Steve Mount

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

It aint Hollywood 4 out of 5 stars.
32 of 32 people found this review helpful.

This is the real MCoy. The authors appear to know their subect well and have done their homework. I thank you for that because this is my first read on the subject of real cowboy clothing and I wanted facts. The detail was very good and in some cases too good as in the section on horse bits. What cowboys acually wore and why is fascinating. Don't get me wrong I enjoy the Hollywood costumes but it's nice to know the real story and this is it.

Cowboy gear and clothes -- all of it 5 out of 5 stars.
31 of 31 people found this review helpful.

I loved this book. A comprehensive guide to real working cowboys' -- not in the movies or on TV; on the open range of Wyoming, in the old days -- clothing and equipment. Hundreds of black and white photos and drawings; illustrations from historic catalogs; schematics of tack; diary entries and contemporary descriptions; history and the reasons behind the specific gear of the cowboys (and girls) of the Northern Plains from 1870 to just until the Great Depression. The authors are historians and give us the names of, and the stories behind, the people and the great stuff; Levi's of course, but how about 'Rodeo Booger Reds'? -- a would-be competitor. Underwear -- you can imagine how important Union Suits were before central heating. (They could be ordered in white, grey, ecru, light blue, and, finally, in 1909: pink.) Shirts, jackets, leather goods and fabrics. Horse gear. There's even a chapter on Camp Equipment; now you can build a chuck wagon. Loads of well-captioned photos, many portraits; you're 'there.' Best of all, the tone is enthusiatically academic rather than 'nostalgic.' This is the real thing -- a scholarly, well-organized and well-written book about a vanished world.

Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album

Teresa Jordan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Absorbing memoir of a Wyoming ranch family . . . 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

There's a growing literature of memoirs written by women who grew up on ranches, and this is a fine addition to it. Jordan tells of her family, who for four generations raised cattle in southeast Wyoming, north of Laramie and Cheyenne. With some irony, it was more circumstance than a love of ranching that kept the Jordans on the land, until the author's father sold the home place in the 1970s. But the love of that spot on earth lives on strongly in the author, and her book is a tribute to it and to her family who toiled there through good years and bad.

She clearly admires the men who labored on horseback raising cattle, devoting chapters to her grandfather, her father, and the many foremen and ranch hands who worked for them. Fully engaging, too, are her memories of the women and the imprint they have made on herself. Three portraits in particular stand out: her mother, Jo, with a warm, generous, and independent spirit, who died suddenly at an early age; her great aunt Marie, who loved her horses and dogs like the children she never had, and lived happily together with her husband and her husband's best friend; and finally her grandmother Effie, a puzzlingly bitter woman whose wishes for a full life seem to have been frustrated from girlhood because of her gender and social limitations.

There's much in this book to commend it, including a chapter devoted to the calving season and another describing the physically punishing nature of ranch work. Her chapter on her great aunt Marie includes excerpts from her journals, and each chapter is introduced with a photograph from the family album. The book closes with a description of the author's wedding at the community center near where she grew up, an idyllic day poignant for its wholehearted celebration of a way of community life that is rapidly vanishing.

I recommend this book to readers interested in the West, ranching, family memoirs, and personal journeys. Also recommended: Mary Clearman Blew's "All But the Waltz," Linda Hasselstrom's "Windbreak," and Judy Blunt's "Breaking Clean."

Editorial Review:

The daughter and granddaughter of Wyoming ranchers, Teresa Jordan gives us a lyrical and superbly evocative book that is at once a family chronicle and a eulogy for the land her people helped shape and in time were forced to leave. Author readings.

Red Desert: History of a Place

Amazon Price: $31.50 List Price: $50.00 Not yet published By: University of Texas Press

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Subjects -> Arts & Photography -> Photography -> Nature & Wildlife
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Editorial Review:

A vast expanse of rock formations, sand dunes, and sagebrush in central and southwest Wyoming, the little-known Red Desert is one of the last undeveloped landscapes in the United States, as well as one of the most endangered. It is a last refuge for many species of wildlife. Sitting atop one of North America's largest untapped reservoirs of natural gas, the Red Desert is a magnet for energy producers who are damaging its complex and fragile ecosystem in a headlong race to open a new domestic source of energy and reap the profits.

To capture and preserve what makes the Red Desert both valuable and scientifically and historically interesting, writer Annie Proulx and photographer Martin Stupich enlisted a team of scientists and scholars to join them in exploring the Red Desert through many disciplines--geology, hydrology, paleontology, ornithology, zoology, entomology, botany, climatology, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, and history. Their essays reveal many fascinating, often previously unknown facts about the Red Desert--everything from the rich pocket habitats that support an amazing diversity of life to engrossing stories of the transcontinental migrations that began in prehistory and continue today on I-80, which bisects the Red Desert.

Complemented by Martin Stupich's photo-essay, which portrays both the beauty and the devastation that characterize the region today, Red Desert bears eloquent witness to a unique landscape in its final years as a wild place.

The White Indian Boy: and its sequel The Return of the White Indian Boy

Elijah Nicholas Wilson, Charles A Wilson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

I really enjoyed this book 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I read the book and then recommended it to a book club I was organizing. We used it as our first book and everyone enjoyed it. I found the stories spellbinding and the history was very interesting. Nick Wilson led a fasinating life and I would recommend this book to anyone interested in history from the old West.

The White Indian Boy and The Return of The White Indian 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 0 people found this review helpful.

If you are interested in America's early frontier west - the days of cowboys, pioneers, explorers and Indians - you will be fascinated with two western classics, The White Indian Boy and its sequel The Return of the White Indian.

The White Indian Boy, first published in 1910, is the story of Nick Wilson, a young Mormon pioneer boy who became the adopted son of Washakie, famous chief of the Shoshone Indians who inhabited areas of western Montana, eastern Idaho, western Wyoming and northern Utah. Nick later became a Pony Express Rider, a driver for the famous Overland Stage, a guide for General Albert Sidney Johnston, and co-founder of Wilson, Wyoming in Jackson Hole.

Years later Nick's son Charles A. Wilson wrote a sequel to his father's famous book, telling of his father's later years and of his own adventures in early Jackson Hole. His book, The Return of the White Indian, is equally as interesting as his father's, telling of Jackson Hole's earliest days, of cowboys and Indians, of big game hunting, lake and stream fishing, world famous celebrities, development of Grand Teton National Park.

These two books, published by the University of Utah Press as a single volume, vividly bring to life a unique time and place in American history. There is considerable humor mingled with historical fact, and enriched with early day photos.

A delightful Foreword has been written by John J Stewart, author of several books and chief founder of the National Association and Center for Outlaw & Lawman History.

Travels in the Greater Yellowstone

Jack Turner

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Award-winning nature writer Jack Turner directs his attention to one of America’s greatest natural treasures: the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Comprised of two national parks, three national wildlife refuges, parts of six national forests, and eleven wilderness areas, Greater Yellowstone is a vast array of differing environments and geographies.
In a series of essays, Turner explores this wonderland, venturing on twelve separate trips in all seasons using various modes of travel: hiking, climbing, skiing, canoeing lakes, floating rivers, and driving his way across the landscape. He treks down the Teton Range, picks up the Oregon Trail in the Red Desert, and floats the South Fork of the Snake River. Along the way he encounters a variety of wildlife: moose, elk, trout, and wolves. From the treacherous mountains in the dead of winter, to lush river valleys in the height of fishing season, his words and steps trace one of the most American of experiences---exploring the West.
Turner, who has lived in Grand Teton for three decades, designates Greater Yellowstone as ground zero for the country’s conflict between preservation and development. At a time when the battle to preserve a wild and natural environment is relentless, his accounts of the areas conflicts with alien species, logging, real estate, oil, and gas development are alarming.
A mixture of adventure, nostalgia, and Americana, Turner’s rare experiences and evocative writing transform the sights and sounds of Greater Yellowstone into an intimate narrative of travel through America’s most beloved lands.

Praise for Teewinot:

"Bursting with a sense of place...a rewarding reading experience replete with ravishing observations of nature."
- Publishers Weekly

"...a measured luxuriance in the landscape, a love song to the natural history of a place...Turner's writing is muscular, never swaggering, and almost lyrical, summoning a Teton Range in its rightful, sublime austerity."
- Kirkus Reviews

"Teewinot is a rare book. The wonderful accounts of mountaineering serve as armature not only for Turner's meditative reverence for the Grand Tetons and his often evocative prose but also for an uncommon density of knowledge of place..."
- Peter Matthiessen, author of Tigers in the Snow

"This is, simply stated, a wonderful and utterly engaging book."
- Jim Harrison, author of Dalva and The Road Home

"Each place must find its muse. The Tetons have found theirs and his name is Jack Turner."
- Terry Tempest Williams, author of Coyote's Canyon

Teewinot: Climbing and Contemplating the Teton Range

Jack Turner

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Jack Turner grew up with an image of the Tetons engraved in his mind. As a young man, he climbed the peaks of this singular range with basic climbing gear and friends. Later in life, he led treks in India, Pakistan, Nepal, China, Tibet, and Peru, but he always returned to the mountains of his youth: the Tetons. Teewinot is his ode to forty years in the mountains that he loves.

this is a book about a mountain range, its climbs, its weather, and the glory of the wild. It is also about a small group of climbers-nomads who inhabit the Teton Range each summer, and who know it as intimately as it will ever be known. Teewinot is a remarkable account of what it is like to live and work in these spectacular mountains. It has something for everyone-spellbinding accounts of dangerous and deadly climbs, unbridled awe at the beauty of nature, and an extreme passion for the environmental issues facing America today. In this series of recollections, one of America's most beautiful national parks comes alive with beauty, mystery, and power.