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“Shootin’—Lynchin’—Hangin’,” announces the advertisement for Tombstone’s Helldorado Days festival. Dodge City’s Boot Hill Cemetery sports an “authentic hangman’s tree.” Not to be outdone, Deadwood’s Days of ’76 celebration promises “miners, cowboys, Indians, cavalry, bars, dance halls and gambling dens.” The Wild West may be long gone, but its legend lives on in Tombstone, Arizona; Deadwood, South Dakota; and Dodge City, Kansas. In Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City, Kevin Britz and Roger L. Nichols conduct a tour of these iconic towns, revealing how over time they became repositories of western America’s defining myth. Beginning with the founding of the communities in the 1860s and 1870s, this book traces the circumstances, conversations, and clashes that shaped the settlements over the course of a century. Drawing extensively on literature, newspapers, magazines, municipal reports, political correspondence, and films and television, the authors show how Hollywood and popular novels, as well as major historical events such as the Great Depression and both world wars, shaped public memories of these three towns. Along the way, Britz and Nichols document the forces—from business interests to political struggles—that influenced dreams and decisions in Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City. After the so-called rowdy times of the open frontier had passed, town promoters tried to sell these towns by remaking their reputations as peaceful, law-abiding communities. Hard times made boosters think again, however, and they turned back to their communities’ rowdy pasts to sell the towns as exemplars of the western frontier. An exploration of the changing times that led these towns to be marketed as reflections of the Old West, Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge City opens an illuminating new perspective on the crafting and marketing of America’s mythic self-image.
The founding of the American West can be studied in no better place than Dodge City and Ford County. Whether it is frontier forts, trails and cow towns, or farms and ranches, Ford County holds original examples. The best-known Wild West lawmen and gunfighters--Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday--gained their fame in Dodge City. Its history began with Francisco Vásquez de Coronado crossing the Arkansas River in 1541, leading to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 (Dodge City is on the 100th meridian border) and the 1821 opening of the Santa Fe Trail by William Becknell. Fort Dodge, built in 1865, still stands as a reminder of the millions of people who passed through Dodge City. The Santa Fe Railroad arrived in 1872, and the buffalo hunters and the Great Western Cattle Trail grew around Dodge City. The pioneer era did not end in the 1800s but continued through the 1930s dust bowl and beyond--demanding the same tough work, cooperation, and high ethics that made surviving possible in the "Great Western Desert."
The exodus of the Northern Cheyennes in 1878 and 1879, an attempt to flee from Indian Territory to their Montana homeland, is an important event in American Indian history. It is equally important in the history of towns like Oberlin, Kansas, where Cheyenne warriors killed more than forty settlers. The Cheyennes, in turn, suffered losses through violent encounters with the U.S. Army. More than a century later, the story remains familiar because it has been told by historians and novelists, and on film. In The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory, James N. Leiker and Ramon Powers explore how the event has been remembered, told, and retold. They examine the recollections of Indians and settlers and their descendants, and they consider local history, mass-media treatments, and literature to draw thought-provoking conclusions about how this story has changed over time. The Cheyennes’ journey has always been recounted in melodramatic stereotypes, and for the last fifty years most versions have featured “noble savages” trying to reclaim their birthright. Here, Leiker and Powers deconstruct those stereotypes and transcend them, pointing out that history is never so simple. “The Cheyennes’ flight,” they write, “had left white and Indian bones alike scattered along its route from Oklahoma to Montana.” In this view, the descendants of the Cheyennes and the settlers they encountered are all westerners who need history as a “way of explaining the bones and arrowheads” that littered the plains. Leiker and Powers depict a rural West whose diverse peoples—Euro-American and Native American alike—seek to preserve their heritage through memory and history. Anyone who lives in the contemporary Great Plains or who wants to understand the West as a whole will find this book compelling.
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A colorful account of five centuries of cowboy culture details the life, history, customs, status, job, equipment, and more of the cowboy from sixteenth-century Spanish Mexico to the present.
"Harrigan, surveying thousands of years of history that lead to the banh mi restaurants of Houston and the juke joints of Austin, remembering the forgotten as well as the famous, delivers an exhilarating blend of the base and the ignoble, a very human story indeed. [ Big Wonderful Thing is] as good a state history as has ever been written and a must-read for Texas aficionados.”—Kirkus, Starred Review The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world. “I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea. Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes, it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Excerpt from Dodge City, the Cowboy Capital and the Great Southwest: In the Days of the Wild Indian, the Buffalo, the Cowboys, Dance Halls, Gambling Halls and Bad Men Whether a preface is explanatory or apologetic, is immaterial, in the use we make of this one. Local history is both personal and public; but the narratives of a border life or from conspicuous events, having an origin and a purpose similar to the discovery of a new country. Local history is the result of development and progress; and each city or state history is the example of the whole country. The history of Dodge City, however, includes a wider environment than the ordinary city or town, because it was the focus of a range of country two hundred miles, north, south, east, and west. Therefore, its center of gravitation was equal in extent to that of a state. Upon this axis revolved and oscillated the bull-whacker, the buffalo hunter, the cowboy, the humble citizen, and the desperado. The character and life of this mixed class of citizenship was greatly sharpened and enhanced by reason of the strenuous and characteristic impulses which governed the circumstances in pursuit and development. There was nothing passive in the life of the plainsman. The objective was the supreme motive; for he stood in face of danger, and his quickness of intuition and sense of warning kept him always alert. A character built up under such conditions must have been able to cope with the dangers and hardships incident to a country infested with warlike bands of Indians, and of outlaws which followed on the flanks of civilization. It is the author of this book, Honorable R. M. Wright, we wish to emphasize in this simple explanation. Mr. Wright came to the plains country a few years before the civil war. As a young man, active and vigorous, he became imbued with a spirit of chivalry and courage, followed by those traits of character inevitable to this kind of life; charity and benevolence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Featured in the PBS documentary The Harvey Girls: Opportunity Bound The legendary life and entrepreneurial vision of Fred Harvey helped shape American culture and history for three generations—from the 1880s all the way through World War II—and still influence our lives today in surprising and fascinating ways. Now award-winning journalist Stephen Fried re-creates the life of this unlikely American hero, the founding father of the nation’s service industry, whose remarkable family business civilized the West and introduced America to Americans. Appetite for America is the incredible real-life story of Fred Harvey—told in depth for the first time ever—as well as the story of this country’s expansion into the Wild West of Bat Masterson and Billy the Kid, of the great days of the railroad, of a time when a deal could still be made with a handshake and the United States was still uniting. As a young immigrant, Fred Harvey worked his way up from dishwasher to household name: He was Ray Kroc before McDonald’s, J. Willard Marriott before Marriott Hotels, Howard Schultz before Starbucks. His eating houses and hotels along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad (including historic lodges still in use at the Grand Canyon) were patronized by princes, presidents, and countless ordinary travelers looking for the best cup of coffee in the country. Harvey’s staff of carefully screened single young women—the celebrated Harvey Girls—were the country’s first female workforce and became genuine Americana, even inspiring an MGM musical starring Judy Garland. With the verve and passion of Fred Harvey himself, Stephen Fried tells the story of how this visionary built his business from a single lunch counter into a family empire whose marketing and innovations we still encounter in myriad ways. Inspiring, instructive, and hugely entertaining, Appetite for America is historical biography that is as richly rewarding as a slice of fresh apple pie—and every bit as satisfying. *With two photo inserts featuring over 75 images, and an appendix with over fifty Fred Harvey recipes, most of them never-before-published.