San Antonio College Library

Illustrated chronicles of Indian life, culture, rituals, confrontations with the white man, etc. on the Western frontier.

This sweeping account traces the histories of the Native peoples of the American West from their arrival thousands of years ago to the early years of the nineteenth century. Colin G. Calloway depicts Indian country west of the Appalachians to the Pacific, with emphasis on conflict and change. Calloway's narrative includes: the first inhabitants and their early pursuit of big-game animals; the diffusion of corn and how it transformed American Indian...

Discusses the beliefs and culture of the Indians living between the Great Plains and the Pacific coast and examines the hostility and cruelties they confronted with the white man during a period of three centuries.

From the introduction to the new edition:"I'll tell you where I went wrong. The faucet in the kitchen always becomes the reality we believe, and the periodic droughts, one of which for much of the nineties savaged the West, remain a fantasy. This happens each and every day as the water roars from the faucet and the skies remain dangerously blue." Charles Bowden- In the quarter-century since his first book, Killing the Hidden Waters, was published...

Includes material on George Catlin, Francis Parkman, Josiah Gregg, John Butterfield, Theodore Roosevelt, among others.

The legendary Wild West has long exerted a powerful influence in our national imagination. In this collection of colorful essays, Frederick Turner--historian, biographer, and naturalist--looks at the ways in which the legend and reality coexist, not always peaceably, in the modern American West. Here are the wild horses competing with cattle for forage on the semi-arid range, fervently protected from extinction by people like "Wild Horse Annie," a...

"The discovery of gold in California began an emigration movement across the plains the like of which has been rarely seen. It also resulted in a flood of memoirs and journals describing the trip and the life of amateur miners in the gold diggings of California. One of the best of these narratives was written by Alonzo Delano, a citizen of Illinois beset with chills and fever, for whom his doctors prescribed the curious remedy of a trip to California--by...