After Lewis & Clark highlights more than sixty paintings, drawings, and prints in the collection of one of America’s finest museums of American art, the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This richly illustrated book presents and places in thematic and historic context many of the priceless portraits, striking scenes, and grand landscapes inspired during the sixty-five years after the Corps of Discovery completed its epic journey.
Archives
All Together in One Place
For Madison “Mazy” Bacon, a young wife living in southern Wisconsin, the future appears every bit as promising as it is reassuringly predictable. A loving marriage, a well organized home, the pleasure of planting an early spring garden. These are the carefully tended dreams that sustain her heart and nourish her soul.
But when her husband of two years sells the homestead and informs her that they are heading west, Mazy’s life is ripped down the middle like a poorly mended sheet forgotten in a Midwestern storm. Her love is tried, her boundaries stretched, and the fabric of her faith tested. At the same time, she and eleven extraordinary women are pulled toward an un-certain destiny, one that binds them together through reluctance and longing and into acceptance and renewal.
American Indian Beadwork
American Indian Beadwork, by Ben W. Hunt and J.F. “Buck”.
Bent’s Fort
Bent’s Fort was a landmark of the American frontier, a huge private fort on the upper Arkansas River in present southeastern Colorado. Established by the adventurers Charles and William Bent, it stood until 1849 as the center of the Indian trade of the central plains. David Lavender’s chronicle of these men and their part in the opening of the West has been conceded a place beside the works of Parkman and Prescott.
Bill Sublette
Renowned as a hardy mountain man, he ranged the Missouri, Big Horn, Yellowstone, and Sweetwater River country between 1823 and 1833. He hunted beaver, fought Indians, and unwittingly opened the West for settlers by proving that wagons could be used effectively on the Oregon Trail. But financial success and silk hats, which strangled the fur trade, eventually led him to take up a less adventuresome life in St. Louis as a gentleman farmer, businessman, and politician.
Sublette helped develop the rendezvous system in the fur trade and blazed the first wagon trail through South Pass. He also established the post later renamed Fort Laramie, helped lay the foundation for present Kansas City, and left a large fortune to excite envy and exaggeration. One of the most successful fur merchants of the West, he also helped to break John Jacob Astor’s monopoly of the trade.
Broken Hand
Known by the Indians as “Broken Hand”, Thomas Fitzpatrick was a trapper and a trailblazer who became the head of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. With Jedediah Smith he led the trapper band that discovered South Pass; he then shepherded the first two emigrant wagon trains to Oregon, was official guide to Fremont on his longest expedition, and guided Colonel Phil Kearny and his Dragoons along the westward trails to impress the Indians with howitzers and swords. Fitzpatrick negotiated the Fort Laramie treaty of 1851 at the largest council of Plains Indians ever assembled. Among the most colorful of Mountain Men, Fitzpatrick was also party to many of the most important events in the opening of the West.
ISBN: 0-8032-7208-1
359 Pages
University of Nebraska Press, 1981
Coffee Mug
White Coffee Mug with black museum logo.
Cora, Wyoming
“Wyoming’s Upper Green River Valley was settled by homesteading cattle and sheep ranchers. Distances between the homesteads were significant, and travel was challenging on the unimproved wagon roads. Small communities offering a post office, store, and school were vital to the land-locked ranchers. In the Valley’s 140-year history, approximately thirty-seven small communities existed throughout this vast area. Cora was one of these communities.
Cora has survived to the present and stands as the oldest remaining unincorporated community in Sublette County. It has survived through a move, literally, buildings and all, the Great Depression, the transition to motorized travel, two world wars, economic competition from other towns, and two attempts to close the post office by the United States Postal Service. It has survived because there has always been a dedicated property caretaker – and because there has always been a community.
In 2017, the Cora Townsite was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This was made possible by the Sublette County Historic Preservation Board who asked local historian, Ann Chambers Noble, to write the nomination. Much of that history is presented in this publication. This is about Cora, and more. It’s a great story of a typical small, rural, Wyoming community that has survived for 130 years.”
– Clint Gilchrist
President, Sublette County Historic Preservation Board “Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in April, 2017 the Cora Townsite was the center for economic and civic activity for the surrounding area. More importantly it was the center for people to come together and share stories and hardships, to talk about news and current events, and to help look after one another. The story of the Cora Townsite is seen in numerous communities across the rural West.”
-Brian Beadles
Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer
Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office
Ann Chambers Noble lives in Cora with her husband, a great grandson of James M. Noble. They raised their four daughters on parts of the original family homesteads. Ann received a B.A. in history from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and an M.A. in history from the University of Utah. She is the author of several books about Wyoming history. Ann is on the Wyoming State Review Board for the National Register of Historic Places.
Crow Killer
by Thorp and Bunker
Crow Killer The Saga of Liver Eating Johnson
Paperback, 192 pages, 8 x 5 inches
Indiana Press 1983
ISBN: 0253203120
Much of the world now knows mountain man John Johnson as Robert Redford in the movie Jeremiah Johnson. The real Johnson was a far cry from the Redford version. Standing 6’2″ in his stocking feet and weighing nearly 250 pounds, he was a mountain man among mountain men, one of the toughest customers on the western frontier. One morning in 1847 he returned to his Rocky Mountain trapper’s cabin to find the remains of his Indian wife and her unborn child, who has been killed by Crow Indians. The discovery made Johnson vow vengeance on the entire Crow nation, and tracking its warriors singly and in groups, he killed 300 of them, scalped them, and ate their livers.
Dutch Oven Cooking
Dutch Oven Cooking by John G. Ragsdale
Etienne Provost, Man of the Mountains By Jack Tykal
The events of (Provost’s) life represent a looking glass into the total history of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. It would have been very difficult to find a person closely associated with the beaver trade in the American west who did not know Etienne, but considered him one of the outstanding individuals of that era. From Santa Fe and Taos to remote valleys of the Rocky Mountains and executive offices of the giant fur companies in St. Louis, his name was known and recognized as one who knew and understood every facet of the business, weather it be trading with Ute Indians in the Great Basin, escaping the treachery of an ambush planned by Shoshone on a remote River which bore his name on early maps, attending the first rendezvous with William Ashley in 1825, guiding a fur trade caravan to or from the annual rendezvous, carrying messages, or accompanying new recruits for the American Fur Company up the River to a remote trading post, his servicers were recognized as invaluable. Etienne Provost; Man of the Mountains, reveals the life and adventures of this giant among fur trade personalities and is welcome addition to the understanding of this remarkable are of the American West.
Every Fixed Star
New trials confront Marie: an abrupt ending to love, separation from friends, the disappearance of one child, a puzzling, painful division from another. Through it all, she struggles to know her purpose and worth. What could this God of the stars care for the survival of a mere woman? Fed by memories of her distant friend, Sacagawea, Marie discovers that inside every challenge is a gift to be treasured.
Firearms, Traps, and Tools of the Mountain Men
This classic history of early-nineteenth-century fur trappers and traders showcases the devices that enabled path-breaking frontiersmen to open the unmapped American West, including:
Canoes and flatboats, axes and tomahawks, Native American spears and pikes, beaver and bear traps, rifles an muskets, knives, hand guns, and more…
Many of the illustrations included were created by the author’s own work on the artifacts available: Carl P. Russell examined, measured, sketched, and photographed them himself. In some instances, the rare specimens were loaned from private or public museum collections for inclusion in this history.
Sprinkled with little known facts and lore that will fascinate everyone with an interest in the American West, this book, the result of thirty-five years of painstaking research, is the definitive guide to the tools of the mountain men.
Forts, Fights, and Frontier Sites
Here, at last, is a book that explores some of the lesser known historical sites in Wyoming. In her hallmark engaging style, Candy Moulton documents scores of Wyoming way stations, military establishments, battlefields, Pony Express stations, Oregon and Overland Trail sites, military expeditions- even ferries and “hog ranches”. Whether you’re a serious student of Wyoming history or just a casual reader, you must have this book on your shelf. This is history that needs to be preserved and Moulton has faced the task head-on with outstanding results.
Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay
“Don Rickey, Jr…has turned the spotlight upon the enlisted man of the regular army during the Indian Wars in the West from 1865 to the 1890’s. In addition to examining manuscript and printed diaries, government records, and newspapers, the author was able to consult over 300 living veterans of the Indian Wars, and to obtain information from them by questionnaires and personal interviews. These unique sources have contributed to the composite view of the regualr enlisted man who by securing the West duried this frenzied period of expansion made a significant contribution to the development of the nation…This view of the enlisted man adds a new and worhtwhile cahpter to the history of the West.” –History News
Forty Years a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri
The son of French immigrants who settled in Maryland, Charles Larpenteur was so eager to see the real American West that he talked himself into a job with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company in 1833. When William Sublette and Robert Campbell sold out to the American Fur Company a year later they recommended the steady and sober young Larpenteur to Kenneth McKenzie, who hired him as a clerk. For forty years, as a company man and as an independent agent, the French-man would ply the fur trade on the upper Missouri River. Based on Larpenteur’s daily journals, this memoir is unparalleled in describing the business side and social milieu of the fur trade conducted from wintering houses and subposts in the Indian country. As Paul L. Hedren notes in his instruction, Larpenteur moved comfortably among Indians and all levels of the trade’s hierarchy. But he lived during a time of transition and decline in the business, and his vivid recital of this affairs often seems to bear out his feeling that he was “born for misfortune.” His lasting legacy is this book, which is reprinted from the one-volume Lakeside Classics edition of 1933.
ISBN: 0-8032-7930-2
388 Pages
University of Nebraska Press, 1989