An acclaimed historian’s “compellingly told” year-by-year account of the pioneering efforts to conquer the American West in the mid-nineteenth century (The Guardian).
 
In all the sagas of human migration, few can top the drama of the journey by Midwestern farmers to Oregon and California from 1840 to 1849—between the era of the fur trappers and the beginning of the gold rush. Even with mountain...

Examines the settlement of the area that became the southwestern portion of the United States, detailing how it evolved from land settled by Native Americans, to Spanish territory, to states that were pawns between the North and South prior to the Civil War.

"From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society. The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire, was then amplified by holdings in Manhattan real estate. Over the ensuing generations, Astors ruled Gilded Age New...

Traveling with his owners from Missouri to Oregon in 1848, Koda, an energetic two-year-old quarter horse, finds the long journey increasingly tedious and tiring until his young owner goes missing on the trail and he must use all his skills to find her.

A history of the life, adventures, and death of William H. Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, written by Sheriff Pat Garrett, the man responsible for killing the outlaw in 1881.

Set in 1855, Book Two continues the tale of four generations of men and women shaping the West as the West shapes them. Adventure, danger, love, armed conflicts, slavery, gold, and Indians play into their worlds and the ways of the American West.

From the 1880s to the 1950s, the Harvey Girls went west to work in Fred Harvey's restaurants along the Santa Fe Railway. At a time when there were "no ladies west of Dodge City and no women west of Albuquerque," they came as waitresses, but many stayed and settled, founding the struggling cattle and mining towns that dotted the region. Interviews, historical research, and photographs help re-create the Harvey Girl experience. The accounts are personal,...