Great Plains Forts
Great Plains Forts introduces readers to the fortifications that have impacted the lives of Indigenous peoples, fur trappers and traders, travelers, and military personnel on the Great Plains and prairies from precontact times to the present. Using stories to introduce patterns in fortification construction and use, Jay H. Buckley and Jeffery D. Nokes explore the eras of fort-building on the Great Plains from Canada to Texas. Stories about fortifications and fortified cities built by Indigenous peoples reveal the lesser-known history of precontact violence on the plains.
ISBN – 978-1-4962-0771-5
216 Pages
Softback
5″ x 8″
University of Nebraska Press, 2023
Tan T-shirt with Green River Rendezvous Image on the front. Museum logo is on the left sleeve with nothing printed on the back.
Lettering and picture are in dark brown.
Sizes available – Small, Medium, Large, X-Large, 2XL, and 3XL.
Logo Meaning:
The circular Beaver Plew represents the treasure that attracted the mountain men to the wilderness. After skinning the beaver, the pelt was stretched on a willow frame to cure prior to shipping.
The trap was the mountain man’s principal tool. He generally carried 6 of them weighing 5-6 ponds each.
The emigrant grave marker and the spur represent some of the same forces that eventually spelled the end of the fur trade era — the beginning of the westward migration and the coming of the ranchers that eventually tamed the wilderness.
The arrow symbolizes the close connection between the native tribes of the Rocky Mountains and the mountain men — both as allies and enemies.
The mountain man’s rifle was used for hunting game as well as for protection. Flintlock and percussion style were used with Henry or Hawken rifles being common.
The Encyclopedia of Trade Goods – Volume 2, Gun Accessories & Hand Weapons of the Fur Trade
This volume is 442 pages long, with 671 illustrations, most in color. It has eighteen chapters covering fighting knives, bayonets, dag knives, pipe tomahawks, arrowpoints, lances, Missouri war axes, spike tomahawks, swords, powder horns, flasks, hunting pouches, and armor.
Other subjects include gun powder, lead, bullet molds, cartridges and loading tools, gun parts, wood, percussion caps, gun flints, gunstock clubs, and knife clubs.
There is a full index and an appendix dealing with the changing chronology of trade goods over several centuries. A second appendix reproduces artist George Catlin’s observations on Indian weapons. – Museum of the Fur Trade
ISBN – 9780-9126-11-19-8
407 Pages
Hardback
11 1/4″ x 11 1/4″
Museum of the Fur Trade, 2021
Guns on the Early Frontiers – From Colonial Times to the Years of the Western Fur Trade
This thoroughly documented, authoritative and highly readable book not only details the weapons used during the settlement and westward expansion of America, but also describes their use by fur traders, trappers, soldiers, and Native Americans. The result is a lively historical examination of the momentous events that were strongly influenced by the gun trade.
ISBN – 978-0-486-43681-4
395 Pages
Softback
5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″
Dover Publications, 2005
Halfway Between Heaven and Hell – The Journey of a Pioneer Family from Halfway, Wyoming
Hattie Haley Johnson and her family settled and survived in the rural West when the region was no longer considered a wild frontier; but it wasn’t truly civilized, either. From the late nineteenth century until deep into the Great Depression, horses were vital for work and transportation, electricity was a dream, and the strength of a man’s back defined his ability to support his family.
Hattie’s life was full of challenges and hard work, but it also brimmed with adventure and variety. She ranched, raised children, helped her husband, Frank Johnson, run a freight operation between Jackson Hole and Idaho, and migrated from southwest Wyoming to the Canada border and back again. Through it all, she nourished herself and those around her with a caring spirit and sense of humor. That is why her story is so compelling.
ISBN: 0-9768113-5-9
148 Pages
Hardback
8 3/4″ x 11 1/4″
Sublette County Historical Society, 1980
Hand Laced Leather Journal
A journal that is in close comparison to what the Mountain Men would have carried.
It is laced around all the edges and comes with an attached small leather strap that can be wrapped around the journal to keep it secured. It helps to protect the pages of the journal while it is packed away in a saddle bag or back pack.
Unlined pages of cotton rag paper. Approximately 105-110 Sheets (210-220 pages). Page count may vary with each journal.
It makes a great personal journal, organizer, diary, travel journal, or sketchbook for an artist.
The journal measures 4 1/4″ x 6″
Sizing of journal may vary.
The story of the settlement in western Wyoming’s Hoback Basin, told through fascinating tales and unusual characters: ordinary people who did extraordinary things, and who with courage and determination shaped history.
ISBN – 1-932636-28-5
365 Pages
Prong Horn Press, 2007
Have You Ever Seen a Bear with a Purple Smile?
Where are the bears with purple smiles? They are in the woods walking mile after mile searching for the next huckleberry pile.
ISBN: 1-978-1-59152-114-3
16 Pages
Hardback
11 1/4″ x 8 3/4″
Farcountry Press, 2013
Heavy Leather Journal
A journal that is in close comparison to what the Mountain Men would have carried.
It comes with an attached small leather strap that can be wrapped around the journal to keep it secured. It helps to protect the pages of the journal while it is packed away in a saddle bag or back pack.
Unlined pages of cotton rag paper. Approximately 105-110 Sheets (210-220 pages). Page count may vary with journals.
It makes a great personal journal, organizer, diary, travel journal, or sketchbook for an artist.
The journal measures 5″ x 7″
Sizing of journal may vary.
Hello, Wyoming!
Join the Bison as they explore Wyoming!
ISBN – 978-1-64194-007-8
16 Pages
Hardback
6″x 6″
Applewood Books, 2020
Hidden Valley Homestead
Ben Whitaker left Pennsylvania in 1880 along with his friends, Will and Walt Stewart. With no clear plan, they worked their way west by helping drive cattle from Nebraska to Oregon. When they finished the cattle drive, the three men returned to the majestic mountains of Wyoming Territory, where the Stewart brothers set up a sawmill, and Ben became a cattle rancher.
The wide western valley was their dream come true. Abundant timber provided Will and Walt the lumber to build cabins and barns. A creek along the length of a meadow gave Ben plenty of water for his ranch.
Several years later, when the land was surveyed, they applied for homesteads to legally own the valley. Ben’s cabin was on his homestead but his barns and water well were on the vacant homestead between his own and the Stewarts. Desperate to secure those one hundred and sixty acres before someone else applied for them, Ben asked his brother Calen to come from Pennsylvania and take up the vacant land.
Caleb agreed, but he never arrived. In his stead, another hesitant pioneer appeared–someone who would take up the homestead only under certain conditions. Ben soon realized he would pay a high price to obtain the land on which he had set his heart.
ISBN – 978-0-9817649-2-4
241 pages
Hardback
5 3/4″ x 8 3/4″
Seven Cross Lazy L Productions, 2014
Historical Atlas of the American West
The enduring image evoked by the American West is one of grand physical and historical romance, spectacle, and drama. Many generations of historians, both popular and academic, have sought to communication the unique characteristics of this region, whose history and physical setting have for so long captured the public imagination. In the Historical Atlas of the American West, a historian and a geographer meet this challenge by telling the story of the region from a comprehensive geographical perspective. Defining the American West as the seventeen contiguous states from the one-hundredth meridian westward (Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, California, Oregon, and Washington), Warren A. Beck and Ynez D. Haase provide seventy-eight maps, each with explanatory text and a selective bibliography of further readings.
ISBN – 978-0-8061-2456-8
111 Pages
Softback
8 1/2″ x 11″
University of Oklahoma Press, 1989
Hold Tight the Thread
As the 1840’s bring conflict to the Pacific Northwest’s rugged Columbia Country, new challenges face Marie Dorion Venier Toupin, the wife, mother and Ioway Indian woman who crossed the Rocky Mountains with the Astor expedition, the first big overland expedition after Lewis and Clark’s. On French Prairie in the newly forming Oregon Territory, Marie strives to meet the needs of her conflict-ridden neighbors; British settlers and Americans, missionaries and disease-stricken natives, fur trappers and French-Canadian farming families, and the surviving natives of the region.
At the same time, as a mother, Marie must weave together the threads of an unraveling family. One daughter compares and judges as she seeks to find her place; another reaches for elusive evidence of her mother’s love. As Marie’s memories are threatened with the emergence of a figure from the past, she discovers and empowering spiritual truth: Unconditional love can shed light on even the darkest places in the heart.
ISBN: 978-1-57856-501-6
410 Pages
Softback
5 1/2″ x 8 1/4″
Waterbrook Press, 2004
How the West was Drawn – Mapping, Indians, and the Construction of the Trans-Mississippi West
How the West was Drawn explores the geographic and historical experiences of the Pawnees, the Iowas, and the Lakotas during the European and American contest for imperial control of the Great Plains during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. David Bernstein argues that the American West was a collaborative construction between Native peoples and Euro-American empires that developed cartographic processes and culturally specific maps, which in turn reflected encounter and conflict between settler states and indigenous peoples.
Bernstein explores the cartographic creation on the Tran-Mississippi West through an interdisciplinary methodology in geography and history. He shows how the Pawnees and the Iowas — wedged between powerful Osages, Sioux, the horse- and captive-rich Comanche Empire, French fur traders, Spanish merchants, and American Indian agents and explorers–devised strategies or survivance and diplomacy to retain autonomy during this era. The Pawnees and the Iowas developed a strategy of cartographic resistance to predations by both Euro-American imperial powers and strong indigenous empires, navigating the volatile and rapidly changing world of the Great Plains by brokering their spatial and territorial knowledge either to stronger indigenous nations or to much weaker and conquerable American and European powers.
ISBN – 978-0-8032-4930-1
303 Pages
Hardback
6 1/4″ x 9 1/4″
University of Nebraska Press, 2018
Hugh Glass – Grizzly Survivor
In 1823 a bear attack left Hugh Glass struggling for life on the plains of present-day South Dakota. Abandoned by his comrades, he crawled two hundred miles to the nearest trading post before setting out on an odyssey of revenge, only to forgive the men who had deserted him. The story of Hugh Glass has provided fertile grounds for novels, biographies, stories, comics, and an Oscar-winning film, but the real man remains a mystery.
Little is known about Glass’s origins, and nothing remains to document his physical appearance. Like most mountain men, he might have simply faded into history. Instead, Glass’s encounter with bear sparked a great western myth, as a series of writers built on his story to illustrate their visions of the American Character. Glass’s legend is still growing today, magnified through bestselling books and films like Lord Grizzly and The Revenant.
ISBN: 978-0-9852905-3-5
238 Pages
Softback
4 3/4″ x 8″
South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2016
Hurry McMurry – W. N. “Neil” McMurry, Wyoming Entrepreneur
This biography clearly illustrates what an individual with both ambition and high moral standards can accomplish.
W.N. “Neil” McMurry grew up in Depression-era Casper, Wyoming, survived the freezing turret of a B-17 Flying Fortress dodging flak over Germany, and has persevered through the booms and bust of Wyoming’s business environment. His companies have built much of the state’s infrastructure and were instrumental in opening the huge gas fields of the Jonah Prospect and Pinedale Anticline. With an eye on Wyoming’s future, he has continued to develop new companies and ventures into the twenty-first century.
By assuming responsibility, taking personal risks, and working incredibly hard, Neil McMurry became a true entrepreneur. But most importantly, he has succeeded through honest business practices and by caring about the people around him.
As we struggle with the fallout from one of our nation’s worst recessions, brought on by unethical business dealings, it is refreshing to read about those who have achieved their goals with their characters intact. Neil McMurry is proof that it can be done.
Neil also believes that financial success is accompanied by an obligation to give back. Neil’s foresight and philanthropy have directly benefited thousands of people, especially those whom he respects the most: the hard-working men and women of Wyoming. He is a role model for all.
ISBN – 978-0-615-37646-2
161 Pages
Hardback
11″ x 8 3/4″
VLM Publishing LLC, 2010
