The Mountain Men – The Dramatic History and Lore of the First Frontersmen
To know how the West was really won, start with the exploits of these unsung mountain men who, like the legendary Jeremiah Johnson, were real buckskin survivalists. Preceded only by Lewis and Clark, beaver fur trappers roamed the river valleys and mountain ranges of the West, living on fish and game, fighting or trading with the Native Americans, and forever heading toward the untamed wilderness.
In this story of rough, heroic men and their worlds, Laycock weaves historical facts and practical instruction with profiles of individual trappers, including harrowing escapes, feats of supreme courage and endurance, and sometimes violent encounters with grizzly bears and Native Americans.
ISBN: 978-1-4930-1882-6
246 Pages
Softback
6″ x 9″
Lyons Press, 2016
The Mystery of John Colter – The Man Who Discovered Yellowstone
From the first account of “Colter’s Run,” published in 1810, fascination with John Colter, one of America’s most famous and yet least known frontiersmen and discoverer of Yellowstone Park, has never waned. Unlike other legends of the era like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson, Colter has remained elusive because he left not a single letter, diary, or reminiscence. Gathering the available evidence and guiding readers through a labyrinth of hearsay, rumor, and myth, two Colter experts for the first time tell the whole story of Colter and his legend.
ISBN – 978-1-4422-6282-9
243 Pages
Softback
6″ x 9″
Rowman & Littlefield, 2014
The Oregon Trail: Yesterday and Today
Here lies a description of the history of the Oregon Trail- from past to present. It is a unique blend of maps, guides, emigrant diaries and journals, old drawings and paintings, together with recent photographs. This book tells the story of the Oregon Trail in an interesting, easy to read manner and is packed with information for every one, the armchair traveler, the tourist, the historian and the Oregon Trail buff.
The realities of the trail are examined, as the misconceptions that have surrounded it are dispelled. The trail is explored through the eyes of the early emigrants’ art and diaries, which stand as evidence of their experiences and their true amazement as they traveled westward. Old paintings are compared to similar views today as photographed by the author while many of the landmarks along the trail still remain. Learn about he people and events that brought so many people west in the years of its development. Not only will you read about the trail, you will experience it almost as if you were and early emigrant yourself.
ISBN: 978-0-87004-319-2
197 Pages
Softback
6″ x 9″
Caxton Press, 2008
The Original Journal of Charles Larpenteur – My Travels to The Rocky Mountains Between 1833 and 1872
“Times lonesome enough to kill a dog.” Charles Larpenteur is speaking of a time in 1871 when he’d left the fur trade on the Upper Missouri and had begun his retirement in northwestern Iowa. But his language is reminiscent of that in his journal in which he speaks of the many long, dull, and melancholy days he’d spent at his remote post on that distant stretch of river, so far from the comforts of St. Louis. But his chronicle also is packed with intimate details of life on the frontier, with information on trading activities and its personnel, and on the repetitive disappointments that characterized his long life.
318 Pages
Hardback
7 1/4″ x 10 1/4″
The Museum Association of the American Frontier, 2007
The Paintings of Tucker Smith – A Celebration of Nature
This unique portfolio provides an overview of the artist and his work that is distinct from that experienced in an art museum or a fine arts gallery. This book includes more than one hundred, high-quality reproductions of selected paintings spanning the artist’s career, as well as studies, sketches, and photographs that offer an illuminating study of the creative process. Much more than a summation of a brilliant career, this fine collection of images is an invitation, an extended gesture of the artist toward friendship and communion.
ISBN – 1-55868-849-8
204 Pages
Hardcover
12″ x 10″ x 1 1/8″
Graphic Arts Books – 2004
The Perilous West – Seven Amazing Explorers and the Founding of the Oregon Trail
Although a host of adventures stormed west in 1806 after Lewis and Clark’s safe return, seven of them left unique legacies because of their monumental journeys, their lionhearted spirit in the face of hardship, and the way their paths intertwined time and again.
These seven counted the Tetons, Hells Canyon, and South Pass among their discoveries. More important, they forged the Oregon Trail — a path destined to link the Atlantic coast with the Pacific, spurring national expansion as it carried trappers, soldiers, pioneers, missionaries, and gold-seekers westward.
ISBN: 978-1-4422-1113-1
239 Pages
Softback
6″ x 9″
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013
The Plains Warbonnet – It’s Story and Construction
The Plains Indian Warbonnett has become the symbol most identified by the public with all Native Americans, regardless of their particular tribe or culture. This book addresses this misconception and other fasinating myths and realities pertaining to the warbonnet, such as its evoltion, the meanings of the feathers and how they were acquired , materials and decorations, who had the rights to make and wear bonnets, and the several significant stylistic variations of the “typical” Plains warbonnet. By learning that the historic Plains bonnet was associated with bravery, power, and Indian traditions, we see that it was much more than a colorful head decoration.
ISBN – 1-929572-23-9
128 Pages
Softback
8.25″ x 10.75″
Crazy Crow Trading Post, 2013
The Plainsmen of the Yellowstone – A History of the Yellowstone Basin
Here are names that have lived in history — William Clark, John Colter, Jedediah Smith, Custer, Cook, Terry — and others not so familiar: François Antoine Larocque, who explored the Yellowstone well in advance of Clark: Woman Chief, the Gros Ventre girl who became a renowned warrior; the shadowy outlaws of the Hole-in-the-Wall country of the Big Horns. Famous and infamous, renowned and obscure, the Indians, the trappers, the military, the cowboys, the vigilantes, the settlers are portrayed not as isolated figures but in relation to, and within, the history of this dramatic region.
ISBN – 0-8032-5026-6
480 Pages
Softback
5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″
University of Nebraska Press, 1969
An American Legend
It operated less than two years. It lost an enormous amount of money. But the Pony Express delivered the mail across a continent at a critical time and captured the imagination of people all over the world like few events in the history of the American West.
ISBN – 978-0870044762
321 Pages
Caxton Press, 2010
The Prairie Traveler – The 1859 Handbook for Westbound Pioneers
For today’s reader, Marcy’s manual offers a fascinating view of the rigors and hazards of crossing the country. In 1859, it provided life-or-death advice on everything from finding water and building a fire to avoiding quicksand and treating snakebites. Marcy promised to assist his reader in escaping unforeseen disasters and maintaining relative comfort during the journey, adding that the intrepid pilgrim “will feel himself a master spirit in the wilderness he traverses, and not the victim of every new combination of circumstances which nature affords or fate allots, as if to try his skill and prowess.”
Marcy’s counsel encompasses choosing the best routes to California, wagon maintenance and the selection and care of horses, food supplies, first-aid procedures, and fording rivers. He also conveys information “concerning the habits of Indians,” including Native American tracking and hunting techniques, smoke signals and sign language, and battle tactics. Twenty-one original illustrations complement the informative and entertaining text.
ISBN – 978-0-486-45150-3
256 Pages
Softback
5″ x 8″
Dover Publications, 2006
The Revenant – A Novel of Revenge
The year is 1823, and the trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Hugh Glass is among the company’s finest men, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker. But when a scouting mission puts him face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive. Two company men are dispatched to stay behind and tend to Glass before he dies. When the men abandon him instead, Glass is driven to survive by one desire: revenge. With shocking grit and determination, Glass sets out, crawling at first, across hundreds of miles of uncharted American frontier. Based on a true story, The Revenant is a remarkable tale of obsession, the human will stretched to its limits, and the lengths that one man will go to for retribution.
ISBN: 978-1-250-10119-8
262 Pages
Softback
5 1/2″ x 8 1/4″
Picador/St. Martin’s Press, 2002
The Saga of Hugh Glass – Pirate, Pawnee, and Mountain Man
Before his most fabulous adventure, Hugh Glass was captured by the buccaneer Jean Lafitte and turned pirate himself until his first chance to escape. Soon he fell prisoner to the Pawnees and lived for four years as one of them before he managed to make his way to St. Louis. Next he joined a group of trappers to open up the fur-rich, Indian-held territory of the Upper Missouri River. Then unfolds the legend of a man who survived under impossible conditions: robbed and left to die by his comrades, he struggled alone, unarmed, and almost mortally wounded through two thousand miles of wilderness.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-5834-1
237 Pages
Softback
5 1/4″ x 8″
University of Nebraska Press, 1963
The Splendid Wayfaring – Jedediah Smith and the Ashley-Henry Men, 1822 – 1831
The exciting narrative begins in 1822, when (Jedediah) Smith ascended the Missouri River in the first fur-trading expedition of William H. Ashley and Andrew Henry, and ends in 1831, when he was killed by Comanche Indians on the Cimarron River. In the intervening years Smith became the first explorer to recognize South Pass as the gateway to the Far West, the first overlander to reach California and travel up the coast to the Columbia River, and the first white man to cross the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin from west to east.
ISBN: 0-8032-5723-6
290 Pages
Softback
5″ x 8″
University of Nebraska Press, 1920
The Story of Sacajawea – Coloring Book
Kidnapped as a young child by enemy warriors, sold to a French trader, and married at fourteen, Sacajawea was just a teenager when she helped lead explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark through the wilderness of the great American Northwest.
ISBN: 978-0-486-42374-6
32 Pages
Softback
8 1/8″ x 10 7/8″
Dover Publications, 2002
The Taos Trappers – The Fur Trade in the Far Southwest, 1540 – 1846
In this first comprehensive history of the fur trade in the Far Southwest, David J. Weber has utilized Spanish, Mexican, and American sources to describe the development of Taos trade and the early penetration of the area by French and American trappers. There such colorful characters as Ewing Young, Kit Carson, Peg-leg Smith, and the Robidoux brothers pioneered new trails to the Colorado Basin, the Gila River, and the Pacific and contributed to the wealth that flowed east along the Santa Fe Trail
ISBN – 0-8061-1702-8
263 Pages
Softback
5.5″ x 8.5″
University of Oklahoma Press, 1982
The Truth about Sacajawea
Sacajawea made a great contribution during the travel by The United States Army’s Corps of Discovery and their history making exploration of our continent west of the Mandan/Hidatsa villages to the Pacific Ocean.
She was adept at finding food. She was a symbol to native warriors that the expedition was a peaceful party of travelers. She was helpful as a source of information about the land from the Three Forks area to the Lemhi Valley. However, it is clear that her main contribution was as an interpreter when the expedition was in dire need of horses and a guide to make the critical traverse of the mountains before winter shut them off.
ISBN: 978-1-880114-18-6
96 Pages
Softback
6″ x 9″
Grandview Publishing,1997
