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Reprint. Originally published: New York: Atheneum, 1983.
The Great Basin is a hydrographic region that includes most of Nevada and parts of five other Western states. The histories of four of the Western rivers of the Great Basin--the Walker, the Truckee, the Carson and the Humboldt--are explored in this book, along with three of the western lakes of the Great Basin: Lake Tahoe, Pyramid Lake, and Walker Lake. Drawing on a range of sources, the coauthors address both the natural and the human aspects of the history and likely futures of Great Basin waterways.
“[This] richly documented book is the definitive study of the decisive role mountain men played in the exploration and expansion of the Western frontier.” —Jay P. Dolan, The New York Times Book Review Early in the nineteenth century, the mountain men emerged as a small but distinctive group whose knowledge and experience of the trans-Mississippi West extended the national consciousness to continental dimensions. Though Lewis and Clark blazed a narrow corridor of geographical reality, the West remained largely terra incognita until trappers and traders—such as Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick, and Jedediah Smith—opened paths through the snow-choked mountain wilderness. These and other Mountain Men opened the way west to Fremont and played a major role in the pivotal years of 1845–1848 when Texas was annexed, the Oregon question was decided, and the Mexican War ended with the Southwest and California in American hands—thus making the Pacific Ocean America’s western boundary.
In 1807, a year after Lewis and Clark returned from the shores of the Pacific, groups of trappers and hunters began to drift West to tap the rich stocks of beaver and to trade with the Native nations. Colorful and eccentric, bold and adventurous, mountain men such as John Colter, George Drouillard, Hugh Glass, Andrew Henry, and Kit Carson found individual freedom and financial reward in pursuit of pelts. Their knowledge of the country and its inhabitants served the first mapmakers, the army, and the streams of emigrants moving West in ever-greater numbers. The mountain men laid the foundations for their own displacement, as they led the nation on a westward course that ultimately spread the American lands from sea to sea.
Having reported on some of the world's most violent, least understood regions in his bestsellers Balkan Ghosts and The Ends of the Earth, Robert Kaplan now returns to his native land, the United States of America. Traveling, like Tocqueville and John Gunther before him, through a political and cultural landscape in transition, Kaplan reveals a nation shedding a familiar identity as it assumes a radically new one. An Empire Wilderness opens in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where the first white settlers moved into Indian country and where Manifest Destiny was born. In a world whose future conflicts can barely be imagined, it is also the place where the army trains its men to fight the next war. "A nostalgic view of the United States is deliberately cultivated here," Kaplan writes, "as if to bind the uncertain future to a reliable past." From Fort Leavenworth, Kaplan travels west to the great cities of the heartland--to St. Louis, once a glorious shipping center expected to outshine imperial Rome and now touted, with its desolate inner city and miles of suburban gated communities, as "the most average American city." Kaplan continues west to Omaha; down through California; north from Mexico, across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas; up to Montana and Canada, and back through Oregon. He visits Mexican border settlements and dust-blown county sheriffs' offices, Indian reservations and nuclear bomb plants, cattle ranches in the Oklahoma Panhandle, glacier-mantled forests in the Pacific Northwest, swanky postsuburban sprawls and grim bus terminals, and comes, at last, to the great battlefield at Vicksburg, Mississippi, where an earlier generation of Americans gave their lives for their vision of an American future. But what, if anything, he asks, will today's Americans fight and die for? At Vicksburg Kaplan contemplates the new America through which he has just traveled--an America of sharply polarized communities that draws its population from pools of talent far beyond its borders; an America where the distance between winners and losers grows exponentially as corporations assume gov-ernment functions and the wealthy find themselves more closely linked to their business associates in India and China than to their poorer neighbors a few miles away; an America where old loyalties and allegiances are vanishing and new ones are only beginning to emerge. The new America he found is in the pages of this book. Kaplan gives a precise and chilling vision of how the most successful nation the world has ever known is entering the final, and highly uncertain, phase of its history.
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.
"Life in the American West was difficult. Pioneers and explorers had to deal with rough terrain, extreme weather, deadly animal attacks, and many other challenges. Discover the terrifying true stories of Hugh Glass, Janette Riker, the Donner Party, and others who survived in the rugged American West."--Back cover.
Countless studies of the American West have been written from the viewpoint of history, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. But the West has seldom been written about with the reflective pen of a philosopher. Offering more than a fresh retelling, in thoroughly human terms, of the major historical events of the nineteenth-century West, Gerald Kreyche also leads the reader in a search for the spirit of the West itself. That spirit was one with the American Dream, which offered freedom, individualism, and self-sufficiency to those strong enough and gutsy enough to heed the call of Manifest Destiny. Although the West was and is the most American part of America itself, its natural wonders, its spacious grandeur, its myths and mystique have captured the hearts and imaginations of people the world over. We have all experienced the quickened pulse at the mention of things indelibly western—tumbleweed, mountain men, high plains, cowboys and Indians, sod houses, coyotes, and grizzlies. And who doesn't react to such bigger-than-life figures as Jim Bridger, Buffalo Bill, George Armstrong Custer, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse? The personal humdrum of our times rapidly disappears when, through the magic of western films, TV shows, and books, we vicariously lose ourselves and then find ourselves in the American West of a bygone time. The West, then, produced a quasi-separate culture. And, as each culture must, it gave birth to its own ethos, its own special character, its own tone and set of guiding beliefs. Kreyche contends that in the process of "westering," the veneer of the sophisticated easterner was sloughed off, leaving in sharp outline the frontiersman and the pioneer. In their own manner, these men and women produced a new species of homo americanus.
In 1884 Montana and Dakota were overrun with hordes of outlaws. Granville Stuart, asks his ranch foreman, to organize a vigilante posse from his ranch hands. Harley chose twelve tight-lipped cowboysThe success of the vigilante raids were noted in the regional press of the day. Sixteen period newspapers are quoted and attributed. Twelve Quiet Men has several likeable characters. One memorable young man is a New York dude. We watch as he learns about life and grows to be a man. TQM is a thrilling historical western and a heartwarming story of friendship, loyalty, and sacrifice, mildly seasoned with a pinch of love and good-natured humor.Because the author is a Montana native with cattle ranching experience, Twelve Quiet Men rings with authority.Twelve Quiet Men is 100% original and heavily researched. This novel is quite likely the most authentic western ever written.