Old West Books

Undaunted Courage : Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West

Stephen Ambrose

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 349 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Must Read 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I would recommend this book/audio to anyone.
It is fasinating to any one interested in US History and elploration of American. The book manymaps to relate to during yoour read. I later listened to the audio a year later and I really enjoyed it so much the second time through. I had read book reviews before and this one was claimed to the best about Lewis and Clark. Thumbs up!

Editorial Review:

A biography of Meriwether Lewis that relies heavily on the journals of both Lewis and Clark, this book is also backed up by the author's personal travels along Lewis and Clark's route to the Pacific. Ambrose is not content to simply chronicle the events of the "Corps of Discovery" as the explorers called their ventures. He often pauses to assess the military leadership of Lewis and Clark, how they negotiated with various native peoples and what they reported to Jefferson. Though the expedition failed to find Jefferson's hoped for water route to the Pacific, it fired interest among fur traders and other Americans, changing the face of the West forever.

Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West

Hampton Sides

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 136 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great Blood a lot of Thunder 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I have enjoyed this book as much as John Adams. Preconcieved ideas of history are put to rest. For the most part this is a part of history that has not been well documented for me. There was Lewis and Clark and then a big gap. This fills in the gap and is a must read.

Editorial Review:

In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness.

In Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides gives us a magnificent history of the American conquest of the West. At the center of this sweeping tale is Kit Carson, the trapper, scout, and soldier whose adventures made him a legend. Sides shows us how this illiterate mountain man understood and respected the Western tribes better than any other American, yet willingly followed orders that would ultimately devastate the Navajo nation. Rich in detail and spanning more than three decades, this is an essential addition to our understanding of how the West was really won.

A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn - the Last Great Battle of the American West

James Donovan

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Total reviews: 56 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In June of 1876, on a desolate hill above a winding river called "the Little Bighorn," George Armstrong Custer and all 210 men under his direct command were annihilated by almost 2,000 Sioux and Cheyenne. The news of this devastating loss caused a public uproar, and those in positions of power promptly began to point fingers in order to avoid responsibility. Custer, who was conveniently dead, took the brunt of the blame.

The truth, however, was far more complex. A TERRIBLE GLORY is the first book to relate the entire story of this endlessly fascinating battle, and the first to call upon all the significant research and findings of the past twenty-five years--which have changed significantly how this controversial event is perceived. Furthermore, it is the first book to bring to light the details of the U.S. Army cover-up--and unravel one of the greatest mysteries in U.S. military history.

Scrupulously researched, A TERRIBLE GLORY will stand as ta landmark work. Brimming with authentic detail and an unforgettable cast of characters--from Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse to Ulysses Grant and Custer himself--this is history with the sweep of a great novel.

Death of a Gunfighter: The Quest for Jack Slade, The West's Most Elusive Legend

Dan Rottenberg

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Editorial Review:

In 1859, as the US was nearing civil war, Washington's only link with California - America's richest state - was a stagecoach line between Missouri and the Pacific. Plagued by attacks from outlaws and Indians, the stagecoach company enlisted the help of a former wagon train captain.Over the next three years, Jack Slade became a legend, driving away the outlaws, bandits, and Indians to keep the US Mail running. His celebrity grew even more when he was shot and left for dead - only to survive and exact revenge on his putative killers. But the experience left him a changed man, the courageous pioneer turned into a brutal thug, who finally lost his life at the hands of vigilantes. Since his death in 1864, persistent myths have defied the efforts of writers and historians - including Mark Twain - to unravel the truth behind the legend.Drawing on over 50 years' research, "Death of a Gunfighter" finally puts the pieces of the puzzle together and offers an unparalleled look at one of America's greatest fallen heroes.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

Dee Brown

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 168 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

First published in 1970, this extraordinary book changed the way Americans think about the original inhabitants of their country. Beginning with the Long Walk of the Navajos in 1860 and ending 30 years later with the massacre of Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, it tells how the American Indians lost their land and lives to a dynamically expanding white society. During these three decades, America's population doubled from 31 million to 62 million. Again and again, promises made to the Indians fell victim to the ruthlessness and greed of settlers pushing westward to make new lives. The Indians were herded off their ancestral lands into ever-shrinking reservations, and were starved and killed if they resisted. It is a truism that "history is written by the victors"; for the first time, this book described the opening of the West from the Indians' viewpoint. Accustomed to stereotypes of Indians as red savages, white Americans were shocked to read the reasoned eloquence of Indian leaders and learn of the bravery with which they and their peoples endured suffering. With meticulous research and in measured language overlaying brutal narrative, Dee Brown focused attention on a national disgrace. Still controversial but with many of its premises now accepted, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee has sold 5 million copies around the world. Thirty years after it first broke onto the national conscience, it has lost none of its importance or emotional impact. --John Stevenson

Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West

Ethan Rarick

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In late October 1846, the last wagon train of that year's westward migration stopped overnight before resuming its arduous climb over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, unaware that a fearsome storm was gathering force. After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human survival. But until now, the full story of what happened, what it tells us about human nature and about America's westward expansion, remained shrouded in myth.
Drawing on fresh archaeological evidence, recent research on topics ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and diaries made public by descendants a century-and-a-half after the tragedy, Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner party and their unimaginable ordeal: a mother who must divide her family, a little girl who shines with courage, a devoted wife who refuses to abandon her husband, a man who risks his life merely to keep his word. But Rarick resists both the gruesomely sensationalist accounts of the Donner party as well as later attempts to turn the survivors into archetypal pioneer heroes. "The Donner Party," Rarick writes, "is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity."
A fast-paced, heart-wrenching, clear-eyed narrative history, A Desperate Hope casts new light on one of America's most horrific encounters between the dream of a better life and the harsh realities such dreams so often must confront.
Praise for Desperate Passage:
"His is the first significant book, written, like Stewart's, in a novelistic mode and likely to gain popular readership, to incorporate this new data.... Rarick's account is not really about science; it's about humanity.... Rarick has done his homework."--New York Times Book Review
"Rarick takes an evenhanded and thorough approach to the story of the Donners' covered-wagon migration across the country and their winter entrapment in the Sierras. His telling is evocative and easy to read."--Seattle Times
"With a reporter's doggedness and a scholar's thoroughness, Rarick has clarified the historical details. ... Rarick makes this compelling frontier drama all the more so."--National Geographic Adventure Magazine

Nothing Like It In the World : The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869

Stephen E. Ambrose

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Total reviews: 215 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Abraham Lincoln, who had worked as a riverboat pilot before turning to politics, knew a thing or two about the problems of transporting goods and people from place to place. He was also convinced that the United States would flourish only if its far-flung regions were linked, replacing sectional loyalties with an overarching sense of national destiny.

Building a transcontinental railroad, writes the prolific historian Stephen Ambrose, was second only to the abolition of slavery on Lincoln's presidential agenda. Through an ambitious program of land grants and low-interest government loans, he encouraged entrepreneurs such as California's "Big Four"--Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Leland Stanford--to take on the task of stringing steel rails from ocean to ocean. The real work of doing so, of course, was on the shoulders of immigrant men and women, mostly Chinese and Irish. These often-overlooked actors and what a contemporary called their "dreadful vitality" figure prominently in Ambrose's narrative, alongside the great financiers and surveyors who populate the standard textbooks.

In the end, Ambrose writes, Lincoln's dream transformed the nation, marking "the first great triumph over time and space" and inaugurating what has come to be known as the American Century. David Haward Bain's Empire Express, which covers the same ground, is more substantial, but Ambrose provides an eminently readable study of a complex episode in American history. --Gregory McNamee

The Children's Blizzard (P.S.)

David Laskin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 58 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Makes You Shiver 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Laskin's story chronicles a monster blizzard that devastated the Great Plains in January 1888 and left some 500 people -- mostly children trying to get home from school -- frozen dead on the prairie. After a slow start the book became fascinating to me. I could do without all the meteorological stuff or the too in-depth background, but the stories of the families, their struggles and their survival was riveting.

great for a book group 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

In January of 1888, a terrible blizzard, which came to be known as the "Schoolchildren's Blizzard" blew in across the Nebraska & Dakota Territory prairie. It was so-called because the deaths from the blizzard were largely of children who left school because of the bad weather coming. Sadly, they left "at the moment when the wind shifted and the sky exploded (2)."
Using a wide variety of sources, Laskin has put together this account of that fateful day, but the book is much more than just a retelling of the event. He also details other immigrants' experiences such as tough crossings, and the often difficult life once they reached the Dakota territory. Laskin also discusses the state of weather forecasting at the time, and asks some pretty pointed questions about the issue of fault during the course of a natural disaster. I think a lot of people would also agree that the book is a definite statement on the power of nature and the horror it can inflict when people are unprepared (not that people can always be prepared for natural disasters).
I'd definitely recommend this to people who like history in focused, short bursts (like this book or along the lines of something like Isaac's Storm) rather than out of texts. The only part where it even felt a bit boggy was the discussion on the history of weather forecasting, but that didn't really detract from my reading. If you're also interested in life on the plains, this is a good one to read as well. Very well written -- I couldn't stop reading it once I started.

Editorial Review:

Thousands of impoverished Northern European immigrants were promised that the prairie offered "land, freedom, and hope." The disastrous blizzard of 1888 revealed that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled, and America's heartland would never be the same.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors

Stephen E. Ambrose

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 55 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Good, Easy Read 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Very good book that is true to the Ambrose style of writing - very easy and enjoyable to read. Ambrose has the luxury of having 130+ years of research and writing to reference yet the story, as told, is not mired in minute, inconsequential fact. Ambrose provides his opinion (in the final chapters he includes a short analysis/AAR of the battle at the Little Big Horn) in many instances yet it's not distracting nor does it detract from the telling of history - as a historian, that is what Ambrose was paid to do. His description doesn't glorify either Crazy Horse or Custer without balancing his portrayal with measured criticism.

As an ancillary benefit, this book describes the events surrounding Custer's activities in Kansas prior to his march to Montana. As a Kansas native, I found that to be extremely interesting.

Editorial Review:

On the sparkling morning of June 25, 1876, 611  men of the United States 7th Cavalry rode toward the  banks of the Little Bighorn in the Montana  Territory, where 3,000 Indians stood waiting for battle.  The lives of two great warriors would soon be  forever linked throughout history: Crazy Horse, leader  of the Oglala Sioux, and General George Armstrong  Custer. Both were men of aggression and supreme  courage. Both became leaders in their societies at  very early ages; both were stripped of power, in  disgrace, and worked to earn back the respect of  their people. And to both of them, the unspoiled  grandeur of the Great Plains of North America was an  irresistible challenge. Their parallel lives would  pave the way, in a manner unknown to either, for  an inevitable clash between two nations fighting  for possession of the open  prairie.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

Dee Brown

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Immediately recognized as a revelatory and enormously controversial book since its first publication in 1971, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is universally recognized as one of those rare books that forever changes the way its subject is perceived. Now repackaged with a new introduction from bestselling author Hampton Sides to coincide with a major HBO dramatic film of the book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's classic, eloquent, meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. A national bestseller in hardcover for more than a year after its initial publication, it has sold over four million copies in multiple editions and has been translated into seventeen languages.

Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the series of battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them and their people demoralized and decimated. A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was won, and lost. It tells a story that should not be forgotten, and so must be retold from time to time.