Rocky Mountain Life


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Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America


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For all of fur's contentious position in American culture today, historian Eric Jay Dolin shows its centrality in our nation's ever-surprising history. He argues that the trade in animal skins turned colonial America into a tumultuous frontier where global powers battled for control. From the seventeenth century right on up to the Gilded Age, the developed world's appetite for fur made the new continent, with its wealth of fur-bearing wildlife, a seemingly inexhaustible resource. The result was a major boost in the evolution of the colonies into a powerful new player on the world stage. Dolin sheds insight on the ways the fur trade created international tensions--in New England, the Great Lakes, and in the expanding West. Fur traders were often the first white men to map major rivers, forests, and mountains, then soon pushed Native Americans off their lands as John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company attempted to monopolize the West.--From publisher description.







The United States


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The Great Divide


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More than any other American landscape, the Rocky Mountains have prompted a remarkable medley of fierce, poetic dreams. For some 150 years this region served as a landscape of freedom for the black sheep of our culture: from the rebellious sons of wealthy industrialists to African American trappers; from affluent young women struggling for suffrage to the hippies of the 1960s, determined to turn their backs on the establishment. Gary Ferguson spins magnificent tales about these vivid charactersblazing a trail that leads us finally to modern adventure travelers bedecked in high-tech outerwear and toting satellite phones into the wild. From this spot on the crest of the continent comes a fresh look at how the nation's wild lands inspired some of our most cherished notions of freedom, as well as how much we stand to lose should our connections to those lands drift out of reach. 25 black & white photos, index.




Saleratus & Sagebrush


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The Bidwell-Bartleson party may have been generally forgotten, but the group was the first true emigrant train to cross South Pass. If the memories of these men has dimmed, the road they followed has not, for the route is one of the most famous in the history of human migration-the Oregon Trail. Saleratus & Sagebrush chronicles the journeys of these and many other emigrants on the trails west. Robert Munkres relates the stories about the famous and indispensable Fort Bridger and Fort Laramie, the fork in the road at Soda Springs, women's lives on the trail, the family dog, and tales of Indians, friendly and not-so-friendly are richly enhanced by photographs and several reproductions of works by William Henry Jackson.




Pacific Northwest Americana


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