The American Fur Trade of the Far West, Volume 1
Epic in sweep and reach, strongly written and superbly researched, The American Fur Trade of the Far West is a classic if there ever was one. Its publication in 1902 made clear how much of the fur trade was “indissolubly connected to the history of Northern America.”
Hiram Chittenden brought to this enduring work an appreciation of geography and a feeling for the lives and times of colorful trappers and mountain men like Manuel Lisa, William H. Ashley, the Sublette brothers, Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, and Kenneth McKenzie. He provided a comprehensive view of the fur trade that still remains sound.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-6320-8
570 Pages
Softback
5 1/4″ x 8″
University of Nebraska Press, 1986
The American Fur Trade of the Far West, Volume 2
Hiram Chittenden provides a perspective or overall outline of the fur trade that, after nearly a century, remains sound. Volume 2 of this Bison Book edition follows the traps and trails of such colorful characters as Ezekial Williams, Hugh Glass, Mike Fink, and John Colter. Described here are the explorers, missionaries, government survey parties, and Indian tribes of the fur trade West, and the geography that often determined their success or failure.
Nine appendixes containing miscellaneous primary materials precede a bibliography and index. A new feature is a foreword by William R. Swagerty.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-6321-5
994 Pages
Softback
5 1/2″ x 8 1/21″
University of Nebraska Press, 1986
The Art and Life of Merritt Dana Houghton in the Northern Rockies
1878 – 1919
Between 1891 and 1915, pen-and-ink artist Merritt Dana Houghton made over 200 bird’s-eye sketches of towns, ranches, mines, businesses, historic sites, and animals in Wyoming, northern Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and Washington state. Historian Michael A. Amundson brings these many views together for the first time in these pages.
This lavishly illustrated biography details Houghton’s life and work from his birth in Michigan in 1846 to his death in 1919 in Spokane through extensive genealogical records, newspaper accounts, and his illustrations—including historic ranches and bird’s-eye views of Fort Collins, Colorado; Dillon, Montana; and Spokane, Washington and the only known illustrations of long-lost places like Pearl, Colorado, and Rambler, Wyoming. Also included is reproduction of a four-foot-by-eight-foot view of Sheridan, Wyoming and a sixty-image sample portfolio of his best-preserved illustrations organized by type.
ISBN – 978-1-64642-365-1
221 Pages
Hardback
10 1/4″ x 8 1/4″
University of Wyoming Press, 2023
Smith and the even greater number of skilled amateurs in the art have demonstrated that blacksmithing is flourishing, after a brief limbo, rather than dying. History is still being made in the fascinating field of ironworking.
ISBN – 978-0-7858-0395-9
438 Pages
Castle Books, 2009
The Beaver Men – Spearheads of Empire. Second Edition
Covering more than two centuries, The Beaver Men recounts the beginning of the beaver trade along the St. Lawrence to the last great rendezvous of traders and trappers on Ham’s Fork, in what is now Wyoming, in 1834. The Beaver Men is the third in Mari Sandoz’s trilogy of books narrating the history of American west in relation to an animal species.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-2656-2
335 Pages
Softback
5 1/2″ x 8 1/4″
University of Nebraska Press, 1978
Muzzleloader Magazine – The Book of Buckskinning VII
Whether you’re a trapper in the West or a woodsman in the East or a woman in the settlements, The Book of Buckskinning VII has the information you need to create an honest historical impression.
ISBN – 1-880655-05-5
248 Pages
Softback
8 1/4″ x 10 7/8″
Scurlock Publishing Company, 1995
The Buckskinner’s Cookbook
This book is in response to questions about the types of food and old-time recipes available on the frontier. Over the years the author has collected actual recipes or interpolated based on what people said they ate or had available. In this book, the author gives broad coverage to frontier foods. Most recipes are good, some are bad, and all are original, authentic and old.
ISBN – 978-091261107-5
60 Pages
Softback
7″ x 10″
The Fur Press, 1979
The Chuckwagon Cookbook – Recipes From the Ranch and Range For Today’s Kitchen
A cowboy’s life is more than steers, saddles, and spurs. There is also food, and lots of it, cooked out in the open after a rugged day on the range. The tradition lives on in the West and at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Here genuine chuck wagon cooks gather each spring to share recipes, stories, and real cowboy fare. The cookbook features their recipes along with a colorful history of ranch and range cooking.
Modern cowboy cooking blends simple, down-t-earth flavors with current tastes for a style that retains a distinct Western flavor. All the recipes included here have been adapted for home kitchens, but just in case, there are plenty of tips for preparing meals over an open fire. Ranging from classic cowboy favorites to the avant-garde in Western cuisine, these recipes demonstrate ranch-style cooking at its best.
ISBN -978-0-8061-3654-7
301 Pages
Softback
7″ x 10″
University of Oklahoma Press, 1995
For over a century, ranchers along Wyoming’s Green River have been saddling up and driving their cattle into the high, open country of the Rocky Mountains. It’s a journey by hoof and horseback that can run as long as 100 miles, and it’s been going on for over 100 years. It takes the livestock to the largest Forest Service grazing allotment in the United States, where thousands of Drift cattle graze during the summer and fall. They share the wild country with grizzly bears, wolves, and a small number of backcountry riders. But the ranchers and their livestock are under siege. The modern world — highways, real estate development, and drilling rigs — is encroaching. And there are challenges that have been there for a century: grizzly bears and wolves, unpredictable weather, and the age-old problem of getting a younger generation to commit to a dangerous, demanding way of life.
Caldera Productions, 2016
The Field & Forest Handy Book introduces young people to the pleasures & challenges of camping. The author Daniel C. Beard suggests any number of projects, plans, and schemes to entertain those whose travels take them into the open fields and forests, who want to know everything from hoe to build kites and birdhouses to snow houses and snow men.
There are chapters on packing a horse, on making clothes and moccasins, on camp cooking, on building piers, boats, and sleds. As usual, the directions are clear, the diagrams simple, and the activities seductive.
ISBN – 978-1-56792-165-6
428 Pages
Nonpareil Books, 2019 (15th Printing)
The Fur Hunters of the Far West
This edition of Alexander Ross’s journals offers a completely authentic account of the earliest attempts by men of European background to come to grips with the climate, geography, and inhabitants of the Northwest at a time when resourcefulness and daring were prime virtues. Ross’s narrative also contains an on-the-scene interpretation of the conflict between American and British interests, their rivalry for the vast wealth in Northwest furs, the conflict between free trade and corporate enterprise in the wilderness, and the conflict with the North West Company.
Ross himself- a Scotsman by birth, at one time a trader for John Jacob Astor and the Americans- emerges as one of the heroic figures of both American and British frontier history. He recounts with frankness, keen perspective, and a fine sense of humor the human adventures of which he was a part.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-3392-8
304 Pages
Softback
6″ x 9″
University of Oklahoma Press, 1956
The Fur Trade – A History of Arms and Trade Goods
Based on the Private Collection of Milton von Damm
This book of over 460 illustrations of a private collection of Fur Trade Arms and Trade Goods that has been gradually accumulated over the past 30 years. It is accompanied by selected fur trade history to give context to the collection. The brief historical stories provide some insight into the importance of the fur trade, it’s early relevance to the development of North America and its impact on the life styles of Native Americans and western wildlife. Some examples of fine western art provide visual insight into trading, travel and transportation.
ISBN: 978-0-9819945-9-8
237 Pages
Hardcopy
11 1/4″ x 8 3/4″
Minuteman Press, 2013
The Greatest Mountain Men Stories Ever Told
Long the dominant icon embodying the spirit of America’s frontier past, the image of the cowboy no longer stands alone as the ultimate symbol of independence and self-reliance. The great canvas of the western landscape — in art, books, film — is today shared by the figures called Mountain Men. The emerged into the American landscape in the years following the Lewis and Clark expedition, 1804-1806. They were trappers, who sought prize furs they could trade for supplies they needed for another year in the mountains. They were hunters, who depended on their skills to find buffalo, elk, and other game in the mountain vastness. They were survivors, who fought for their lives in the lands of Native Americans like the Blackfeet Indians. They were dreamers, seeking a free-spirited life of living alone in the mountains, untouched by the wars, politics, and rituals of life “down below.” Often dangers were so great they traveled and hunted in “brigades,” with dozens of companions.
Mountain Men – The toughest, most independent men of the American West.
ISBN: 978-1-4930-3287-7
281 Pages
Softback
6″ x 9″
Lyons Press, 2018
The Hair of the Bear – Campfire Yarns and Short Stories
Surprise, deception and exaggeration abound in these outlandish stories which recall the independent, adventurous lifestyle of the early American frontier.
ISBN: 0-943604-30-3
178 Pages
Softback
5 1/2″ x 8″
Eagle’s View Publishing, 1991
The Hawken Rifle – Its Place in History
A book for the very first time that has the whole story of the St. Louis Hawken rifle based upon documentary evidence is related and presented in its historical perspective and woven into the fabric of a rapidly changing frontier we now call the Old West.
ISBN – 0-912611-03-0
104 Pages
Softback
7″ x 10″
The Fur Press, 1979
The Improbable Journey – Lewis & Clark’s Expedition
Of all the momentous events in the early history of the United States, perhaps the most significant was the Louisiana Purchase of 1804, by which a great swath of the North American continent was conveyed by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte of France o the still-young nation for fifteen million dollars.
Nearly doubling the size of the new nation, the Louisiana Purchase allowed President Thomas Jefferson to send Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their Corps of Discovery on an epic two-year journey to explore the new lands from the Mississippi river to the Pacific Ocean.
ISBN: 978-0-615-40744-9
118 Pages
Hardback
13 3/4″ x 11 1/4″
G.M. Metz Publishing, 2010
