Bøger af David Dary

A major one-volume history of the Oregon Trail from its earliest beginnings to the present, by a prize-winning historian of the American West. Starting with an overview of Oregon Country in the early 1800s, a vast area then the object of international rivalry among Spain, Britain, Russia, and the United States, David Dary gives us the whole sweeping story of those who came to explore, to exploit, and, finally, to settle there. Using diaries, journals, company and expedition reports, and newspaper accounts, David Dary takes us inside the experience of the continuing waves of people who traveled the Oregon Trail or took its cutoffs to Utah, Nevada, Montana, Idaho, and California. He introduces us to the fur traders who set up the first "forts" as centers to ply their trade; the missionaries bent on converting the Indians to Christianity; the mountain men and voyageurs who settled down at last in the fertile Willamette Valley; the farmers and their families propelled west by economic bad times in the East; and, of course, the gold-seekers, Pony Express riders, journalists, artists, and entrepreneurs who all added their unique presence to the land they traversed. We meet well-known figures-John Jacob Astor, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, John Fremont, the Donners, and Red Cloud, among others-as well as dozens of little-known men, women, and children who jotted down what they were seeing and feeling in journals, letters, or perhaps even on a rock or a gravestone. Throughout, Dary keeps us informed of developments in the East and their influence on events in the West, among them the building of the transcontinental railroad and the efforts of the far western settlements tobecome U.S. territories and eventually states. Above all, "The Oregon Trail offers a panoramic look at the romance, colorful stories, hardships, and joys of the pioneers who made up this tremendous and historic migration.

"Pioneering Americans of the nineteenth century did not merely rush for gold, lust for land, and thrust aside the West's original inhabitants. These mountain men, cowboys, homesteaders, and cavalry troopers played nearly as hard as they worked, exploiting to the hilt what little leisure they could steal from their labors. Nor did they only carouse-drink, gamble, and womanize-as the West's fiction might suggest. They were spectators at bull and bear fights in California; actors in amateur theatricals in Army garrisons; and participants in communal barn raisings and quilting bees on the prairie. This is a delightful look at a very neglected aspect of the story of westering Americans."-Richard H. Dillon, author of Meriwether Lewis, Fool's Gold, and The Legend of Grizzly Adams. "The men on Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition square-danced to fiddle music. Cowboys' leisure pursuits included singing, storytelling, dominoes, reading, and foot races. U.S. Army soldiers played the newfangled game of baseball and even enjoyed debating and attending concerts. Dary's irresistible narrative recreates card games on Mississippi steamboats, New Orleans balls, frontier campfires and cafe-theatres, Santa Fe saloons, and Wyoming bicycle clubs and mineral spas, and it charts the emergence of a middle class that came to disapprove of prostitution, gambling, drinking, bear-baiting, and buffalo-hunting. An engaging chronicle."-Publishers Weekly. "As David Dary proves in this pleasurable book, the Old West was not all trouble and toil. Much is to be learned here-from mountain men and Indians to cowboys and homesteaders-about how to have fun, no matter the circumstances."-Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. "This lively and good-humored narrative takes the reader on a journey to a time before pleasure ruled lives, a time when fun was where you found it and was what you did when you had time."-Dallas Morning News. "This delightful volume describes activities ranging from the simple and the homespun to the bawdy and elaborate."-Booklist. "A treasury of the colorful characters who spent their brief hour on that wild and woolly stage."-Kansas City Star.

Do you know how Oklahoma came to have a panhandle? Did you know that Washington Irving once visited what is now Oklahoma? Can you name the official state rock, or list the courses in the official state meal? The answers to these questions, and others you may not have thought to ask, can be found in this engaging collection of tales by David Dary.

"A fascinating array of information on everything from how to prepare a buffalo robe to what one could expect to find in a small trading post on the south Platte River in the 1830s. Portrays the coming together of a great nation."" - Philadelphia Inquirer.

Drawing from letters, diaries, expedition reports, business records, newspaper stories, and firsthand reminiscences, Dary fleshes out the story of the men who opened commerce with Spanish America. There are Indians and mountain men, traders and trappers, merchants, surveyors, government commissioners, Spanish people, Americans, Frenchmen, and people of almost every other nationality. A splendid recreation of an important part of American history, fully illustrated with photographs and woodcuts of the period. 110 photos, maps, drawings.

Features forty tales that capture the history, romance, and lore of early life on the plains and prairie - rollicking adventures set between the Rio Grande and the Canadian border that reflect the reality of life in the region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Winner of the Cowboy Hall of Fame Wrangler Award, the Western Writers of America's Spur Award, and the Westerners International Best Nonfiction Book Award.

'Swift-moving tales, always readable, often captivating. Dary is ever the master of narrative. This is a contribution to the literary heritage of the state.' -Thomas Isern, coauthor of Plainsfolk

'Rollicking, adventurous, touching. Whether the reader invests only a few minutes at a time or finishes the book at one sitting, he is in for a lot of fun.' - American West'Fascinating tales set down succinctly and excitingly. There are stories of lost treasure and sudden riches, of outlaws and sheriffs, of massacres and heroics.' - Kansas City Times'A fun book. Where else but in the frontier West were such stories really lived?' - Richard Bartlett, author of Great Surveys of the American West and The New Country: A Social History of the American Frontier