Product Description
On 5 September 1886, America rejoiced as the news flashed from the Southwest that the Apache war leader Geronimo had surrendered to Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles. With Geronimo, at the time of his surrender, were Chief Naiche - son of the great Cochise - 16 other warriors, 14 women and 6 children. It had taken a force of 5,000 regular army troops and a series of false promises to capture the band. Here is an enthralling narrative of revenge and raids, of escape, pursuit and uneasy peace. It is also a powerful and sympathetic portrait of Geronimo - one of the greatest, most feared and most elusive of Indian leaders - a man who became known as 'the tiger of the human race'. ... Read more

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This book, written by the author of the celebrated volume Six Guns and Society, explains why the myth of the Wild West is popular around the world.It shows how the cultural icon of the Wild West speaks to deep desires of individualism and liberty and offers a vision of social contract theory in which a free and equal individual (the cowboy) emerges from the state of nature (the wilderness) to build a civil society (the frontier community). The metaphor of the Wild West retained a commitment to some limited government (law and order) but rejected the notion of the fully codified state as too oppressive (the corrupt sheriff).

Compelling and magnificently suggestive, the book unpacks one of the core icons of our time. It is a unique discussion of market and social theory using cultural myth. Will Wright fully explores how issues of individualism, freedom and inequality in the myth of the Wild West connect up with questions of white, male superiority and environmental degradation. A lovely, path-breaking book that will be of interest to students of sociology, cultural studies and the Wild West.

Customer Reviews (1)

Worthwhile theory, Hard to get to
With great interest and intent, I have sat before this book three times now, pencil in hand, in an attempt to filter through to the essence of this theory. It's in there somewhere but it's hard to find because the inforamtion is not cohesively organized. And even more unforgivable, although it lists an editor, the editor was either out to lunch or must have simply rubber stamped the text. Either author or editor should have done the outlining work for me and augmented or repeated only where necessary.

The introduction touches on the premises and touches on the overall content contained in the chapters and conclusion. One gets a sense of the theory proposed and of the references offered to support the thesis. But beyond the introduction and throughout, the logic of the writing goes in circles with unnecessary repetition and leaves one saying, "Okay, I think I get it. I even want to agree and I think the proof is in there somewhere." But I want and need certainty and this writing style leaves mostly uncertainty.

I think this is a case of an academic writing with his academic peers as audience. We have all run across this before (and here I am stuck with a mere BA in Mass Communication). The "series" editor states that the series "... is to make theoretical issues more accessible to students ..." but this style of writing is inexcusable.

If this is the analysis that explains post-frontier America, and especially the post-frontier American West, I want to know and want others to know but few outside of academia will give it as much chance as I have. I'll return to it periodically but it moves way down on my priorities due to the amount of filtering involved. It doesn't have to be so difficult and it shouldn't be. ... Read more

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This is an ideal text for shared and guided reading for Key Stage 2 pupils within the framework of the National Literacy Strategy. It is set in the 1840s and casts the reader as a farmer setting out on the journey of a lifetime seeking the fertile farmlands of Oregon. Travelling overland as part of a wagon train from the east coast of America to Oregon on the west coast, you face dangers including high mountains, lack of food and water and the prospect of catching various diseases. The cartoon-style illustrations and the narrative approach encourage readers to get emotionally involved with the characters and to follow the story right across North America. Will the wagon train succeed in reaching its goal? The book includes handy hints and informative captions to keep you alive on this dangerous journey! ... Read more

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Rare and Selected Documents Relating to Buffalo Bill and His Wild West Show ... Read more

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Eva Pendleton Henderson, a member of the historical Chisum family, recounts her life on the windy border country of southern New Mexico in the 1890s when it was still a territory. Growing up in a time of legends-Pancho Villa afoot, the rumblings of the first automobile terrifying horses as well as men, drought and fate walking hand in hand, the end of the old West and the beginning of the new. An oft told tale? Yes, but rarely told by a girl and woman who truly saw what was there and wrote of it in a clear, strong, sensible voice. Her story shines as brightly as her unmistakable wit. For all ages; a book for all seasons now in a new edition. ... Read more

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When gold rush fever gripped the globe in 1849, thousands of Chinese immigrants came through San Francisco on their way to seek their fortunes. They were called sojourners, for they never intended to stay. In The Poker Bride, Christopher Corbett uses a little-known legend from Idaho lore as a lens into this Chinese experience.

Before 1849, the Chinese in the United States were little more than curiosities. But as word spread of the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in California, they soon became a regular sight in the American West. In San Francisco, a labyrinthine Chinatown soon sprang up, a clamorous city within a city full of exotic foods and strange smells, where Chinese women were smuggled into the country, and where the laws were made by "hatchet men." At this time, Polly, a young Chinese concubine, was brought by her owner by steamboat and pack train to a remote mining camp in the highlands of Idaho. There he lost her in a poker game, having wagered his last ounce of gold dust. Polly found her way with her new owner to an isolated ranch on the banks of the Salmon River in central Idaho.

As the gold rush receded, it took with it the Chinese miners--or their bones, which were disinterred and shipped back to their homeland in accordance with Chinese custom. But it left behind Polly, who would make headlines when she emerged from the Idaho hills nearly half a century later to visit a modern city and tell her story.

Peppered with characters such as Mark Twain and the legendary newswoman Cissy Patterson, The Poker Bride vividly reconstructs a lost period of history when the first Chinese sojourners flooded into the country, and left only glimmering traces of their presence scattered across the American West. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (27)

Boring
I think this book was put together by simply taking "google" and newspaper article results in a chronological order. I found reading it boring and tedious and I gave up less than half way through.

A Story Within A Story
As is the case with several other reviewers, my copy of this book came from the publisher. I like reading about the tidbits of history which in the end come together to form the big picture, and The Poker Bride sounded like a sure bet to hold my interest. And hold my interest it did! In this book, the story of Polly Bemis is the subtext of the greater story of the Chinese experience in the development of the West around which author Christopher Corbett builds this overview. Bemis' odd story is the bait that lures the reader in, but the story as a whole is one that will set the hook.
Many people interested in the settlement of the frontier and more particularly in the Gold Rush already have some knowledge of the Chinese in California and Nevada. But as this book will inform you, Chinese immigrants ranged far afield from San Francisco, as far away as Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Colorado in their search for a stake that would allow them to return home to enjoy a retirement in relative comfort. These immigrants were mostly men who never intended to remain here in the land of the "heathen" and so did not bring their wives. The result was that the buying and selling of Chinese women into sexual slavery became a big business. At the onset, it was mostly ignored by the authorities and allowed Chinese "tongs" to grow rich and powerful. This impunity meant that these tongs were able to exert near absolute control not only over the trafficking of women, but also over every aspect of Chinese life in areas where there were sizeable numbers of Chinese settled.
In the broad story, Corbett relates the many ways that a Chinese woman could find herself America-bound and herded into the barracoons where the women, if not already pre-purchased, were auctioned to the highest bidder. The luckiest ones ended as the concubines of a rich Chinese man, the unlucky wound up in the miserable hog-pens where disease, violence, and a short unhappy life awaited them. Polly Bemis was in many ways one of the luckiest and it is her remarkable story within a story that lifts The Poker Bride above being just another history.
As for Bemis' story, some criticize the author for using too much anecdote and conjecture to tell it. But so little is really known about her that without some educated guesswork she would remain a mystery. What he does is to tell what is indisputably known, then to take information from a variety of sources contemporary to Bemis, including her neighbors, former associates and tidbits from Bemis herself, allowing the reader to puzzle together a likely approximation of the real story.
Those who like happy endings will be sure to enjoy the bittersweet and almost fairy-tale story of the life of Polly Bemis, the famous "poker bride", particularly when the fates of thousands of her less fortunate countrywomen are considered. For it is from stories such as hers that legends are born. For a fascinating glimpse at a little known aspect of the story of the American West, this book is a winner!

New Light on the Old West
Christopher Corbett's "The Poker Bride" is an appealing combination of yarn with serious history. The poker bride was a young Chinese immigrant who became known as Polly Bemis.During a famine in China, Polly's family sold her to avoid starvation.Polly was sold several times upon immigration to San Francisco where a fate as either a concubine (to a wealthy Chinese man) or a prostitute awaited her.In 1872, Polly was the stakes in a poker game.A white man from Connecticut and proprietor of a bar and gambling den in a remote mining town in Idaho, Charlie Bemis, won the hand and won Polly.Polly nursed Charlie back to health after he was shot in the face by an unhappy gambler.The couple married in 1894 and lived on a remote farm in the wilds of north central Idaho on the upper reaches of the Salmon River near a small community called Warren.In 1923, following Charlie's death, an aged Polly visited the small Idaho town of Grangeville, her first departure from the family farm in over thirty years. The following year Polly visited Boise, Idaho.She then returned and lived quietly on her farm until her death in 1933.

A mix of history and legend, Polly's story occupies only about one-third of Corbett's book. Most of the rest of the book offers a brief history of the Chinese in the early West as they were involved with mining. The history sets Polly Bemis's story in context but is of course highly important in its own right.

The story moves from early California to Idaho with stops in Oregon. It essentially begins with the California Gold Rush of 1848 and the influx of Chinese immigrants which followed in its wake. The overwhelming number of immigrants were men. They were willing to work long and hard for little pay at jobs few others would want to do. The Chinese immigrants soon became perceived as a threat and were subject to severe discrimination and ill-treatment which Corbett documents poignantly.Unhappily, Congress took a rare and drastic step of banning Chinese immigration in the Chinese Immigration Act of 1882. Polly and Charlie may have married in an attempt to avoid Polly's deportation under this law.

The relatively few Chinese women immigrants were, in the early days, much like Polly Bemis. They had been sold and came to the United States to work as sex slaves. Most of them lived in dreadful conditions in cribs and cheap bars under the eye of Chinese gangs or "tongs".Polly Bemis was a rarity in that she managed to escape the fate of many other Chinese women and make a life for herself.

Corbett's book offers a good portrait of the wildness and lawlesness of the early West in San Francisco, Idaho, and the mining camps. Before describing Polly's story, the book discusses the history of Chinese immigration, including the long ocean passage which reminded me of the earlier conditions pertaining on the slave ships several centuries earlier, the development of "Chinatowns",and the spread of prospecting from California to Oregon.Several chapters are devoted to the condition of Chinese women and to the spread of prostitution and sex slavery.Polly Bemis's story is told from the sparse and conflicting contemporaneous records and from accounts prepared by Sister Alfreda Elsenshohn, a nun who lived in the area andwho devoted her retirement years in the 1940s-50s to writing about the early history of Idaho County.

The book recounts an unhappy part of the American experience in the mistreatment meted out to the Chinese. The character of this experience comes through in Corbett's account even though Polly Bemis's story is treated with eclat.The book lacks an index or notes.Instead it has a detailed bibliography which Corbett draws upon extensively in his text.He makes good use of well-known authors such as Bret Harte and Mark Twain but more importantly he draws upon many contemporaneous, obscure accounts of life in the early West.As does any historian, Corbett tries to sift through and assess his sources to arrive at a reasoned interpretation.

I was glad to have the opportunity to read this book and to learn something of Polly Bemis and about the wildness of the old American West.The book is enriched by several photographs, but a map of the Salmon River and its environs in Idaho would have been useful.

Robin Friedman

"Polly Bemis did just that."
I had some doubts when I began to read The Poker Bride. Lately it has seemed to me many popular history books were little more than magazine articles expanded to include a bibliography. The story of Polly Bemis-- a sex worker who got luckier than most-- seemed an excellent candidate for the "not long enough for a book" prize.

To my surprise, Corbett seems to have a book here. And an interesting book at that. We know precious little about Polly Bemis today, and Corbett shares as much of the story as can be told. He also tells us the folklore and the myth that grew up around this unlikely western wife. Best of all (at least for me) Corbett gives us a lot of the context of the early Chinese experience in the US West. It's fascinating stuff. Some of it I knew vaguely from other reading, but I've never had such a clear image of the Chinese migration.

I'd recommend the book for the material alone. Corbett, however, is worth mentioning for his writing. I found it exceptionally good history writing. Books like this are so often obtuse. The prose here is crisp, economical, and always clear. I enjoyed the book itself and not just the subject matter.

Recommended for anyone with an interest in the history of the US West, prostitution, or the Chinese experience in the US.

"Where She Could Hear The River Roar"
Have you ever heard of a more romantic plot than the one offered up here by Christopher Corbett in his new book `The Poker Bride?' I mean come on, a tale set in the chaotic era of the Wild West Gold Rush involving a helpless Chinese girl sold into slavery and prostitution who's eventually rescued by her future husband who wins her freedom in the proverbial poker game! Even more fascinating, it's a true story! It just doesn't get any better than that does it?

However before you get too excited and inform the local women's book club about this heartrending period piece be aware that this is not a romance ala Jane Austin, nor is it the latest release from the Harlequin romance series. The woman known as Polly Bemis (aka: Poker Bride) is utilized by the author as a vehicle through which a greater story is told. In seeing through the eyes of Polly the reader is given the opportunity to experience what life in the American Gold Rush era must have been like for "the first Chinese in the West." In other words this is first and foremost a history book while Polly and her life provide the personal, literal and symbolic face of the immigrants. She's something the reader can identify and sympathize with. In the end one comes to realize her story and the history of the Chinese in the American Wild West were one in the same.

While the prospective romance novel reader will probably not find this book to be what they're looking for, the lover of history certainly will. Christopher Corbett provides us with an expansive portrait of the times that I found absolutely fascinating; early San Francisco history, cultural influences, societal make-up and how these influences where lived out in the everyday life of the rural, shabby townships and mining camps.

Even more impressive is Corbett's treatment of the plight and experiences of the Chinese immigrants; the harsh trans-Pacific sailing conditions, the hatred for the migrant workers and the subjugation of women from both the predominately white society as well as the prevailing cultural traditions practiced by the Chinese themselves. I found the mention of P.T. Barnum and his Asian/Chinese "freaks" exhibit, which included the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng, to be not only unexpected but to be quite revealing concerning the white American opinion of the Asian culture.

Again, if you're looking for a hot, titillating romance look elsewhere, but if you appreciate a comprehensive, well researched, read offering the reader not only a rare glimpse into an exciting moment in American history but a tale of individual endurance and triumph try `The Poker Bride'. ... Read more

Product Description
From the start of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803 to the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906, a great historical drama unfolded on the American frontier. The era of the Wild West was a century-long period characterized by ceaseless exploration, wagon trains straining westward, cattle drives, Indian wars, gunfights, wandering trappers and mountain men, cowboys, rustlers, stagecoaches, and gold. What a century! Among the many fascinating stories recounted in this book are:

• Meriwether Lewis’s first-ever Indian fight • The desperate search during the Lewis and Clark expedition for a passageway through the Rocky Mountains before winter struck • Bespectacled Easterner Teddy Roosevelt’s rude treatment in the Dakota Badlands in the 1880s • The high drama of the San Francisco Earthquake • Anecdotes that follow the construction of the transcontinental railroad • The western explorations of topographical engineer Stephen Lon!

g • The courageous army officer who held the Indians of the Southwest at bay during the Civil War • The criminal adventures of the Dalton Gang • The work of the explorer-botanist David Douglas • The story behind Boothill in Tombstone, Arizona • The legend of Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch • Little-known lawman Thomas J. Smith of Abilene ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Fascinating and well-written
This is the story of the "Wild West" from Lewis & Clark onward. Easy to read and informative.

Interesting Collection of Western Vignettes!
Anyone with an interest in the American West will want to check out this 2002 collection of short stories by C. Brian Kelly, who has done severalother BEST LITTLE STORIES volumes. Kelly offers up over 80 vignettes on the American frontier in the 19th Century. There's something for everyone in this volume from Cumberland House.

To my mind, the title BEST LITTLE STORIES FROM THE WILD WEST is a bit misleading. Its coverage is much wider, entries running from 1801 to 1896. The book is arranged chronologically, the first chapter - "First Explorations" - opening with a five-pager on Meriwether Lewis circa 1801. Lewis & Clark articles take up most of Chapter One, succeeding chapters being devoted to "Mountain Men and Texans," "Emigration, Wars and Gold," "Nation of Two Faces," "Cowboys & Indians, Lawmen & Outlaws," "Sliding into a New Century" and "Fascinating Women of the West."

As might be expected, the book resounds with many famous westerners - Crockett, Bowie, Brigham Young, James Marshall, Black Bart, Sarah Winchester, Custer, John Wesley Powell and a few others not normally thought of as being of the West: Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, etc.

Stories range from grizzly bear attacks to Christmas at an isolated fort, exploits of U.S. Army Apache scouts to accounts of an 1880s Kansas blizzard, shooting the Grand Canyon to the story of the Promontory Summit golden spike and so on. The nice thing about these BEST LITTLE STORIES books is that you can be read them straight through or jump in at any page for some interesting tidbit.

In short, an interesting, entertaining and inexpensive introduction to the American West. Recommended.



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Product Description
When Ishi, "the last wild Indian," came out of hiding in August of 1911, he was quickly whisked away by train to San Francisco to meet Alfred Kroeber, one of the fathers of American anthropology. When Kroeber and Ishi came face to face, it was a momentous event, not only for each man, but for the cultures they represented. Each stood on the brink: one culture was in danger of losing something vital while the other was in danger of disappearing altogether.
-Ishi was a survivor, and viewed the bright lights of the big city with a mixture of awe and bemusement. What surprised everyone is how handily he adapted himself to the modern city while maintaining his sense of self and his culture. He and his people had ingeniously used everything they could get their hands on from whites to survive in hiding, and now Ishi was doing the same in San Francisco. The wild man was in fact doubly civilized--he had his own culture, and he opened himself up to that of modern America.- Kroeber was professionally trained to document Ishi's culture, his civilization. What he didn't count on was how deeply working with the man would lead him to question his own profession and his civilization--how it would rekindle a wildness of his own.
-Though Ishi's story has been told before in film and fiction, Wild Men is the first book to focus on the depth of Ishi and Kroeber's friendship and to explore what their intertwined stories tell us about Indian survival in modern America and about America's fascination with the wild even as it was becoming ever-more urban and modern. Wild Men is about two individuals and two worlds intimately brought together in ways that turned out to be at once inspiring and tragic. Each man stood looking at the other from the opposite edge of a chasm: they reached out in the hope of keeping the other from falling in. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Wild Men is terrific
Sackman has taken a well know story and crafted it into a marvelous excursion into the lives of two fascinating individuals. Along the way his story takes many highways and byways, bringing together a wealth of information and insights into turn-of-the century San Francisco,, native American history, the study of anthropology, train travel, and so much more. A fascinating read, highlighted by numerous photos.

Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the wilderness of Modern America
The author almost abandoned this project when he learned that another book about the last wild Indian (//Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian// by Orin Starn, 2004) was in the works.Encouraged by his publisher, Douglas Cazaux Sackman, a history professor at the University of Puget Sound, Sackman persevered and //Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America// joins the collection of books and film exploring the life of Ishi, the last surviving member of his tribe.Ishi was a middle-aged adult when he was found standing in a slaughterhouse corral in Oroville, California, in 1911.Alfred Kroeber, a prominent anthropologist, secured Ishi's passage from Oroville to San Francisco, where Ishi became a resident of the Museum of Anthropology.For the remainder of Ishi's life, Kroeber, and others, endeavored to capture the language, history, and culture of this living artifact.Sackman describes his book as "...an entirely new narrative exploring different aspects of our shared American history that the meeting of these two men illuminate."His compact, well-written, and scholarly work will stretch your thinking on the value of aboriginal cultures, as well as mankind's relationship to the wilderness.

Reviewed by Diana Irvine ... Read more

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The Story Of The Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado
With historical narratives of famous outlaws; The stories of noted border wars; vigilante movements and armed conflicts on the frontier

... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Great for any fan of westerns
This is the wild west at its worst- men who would do any immoral act for profit, or just for fun. At times their actions caused county-wide wars to break out during which dozens of men were killed. You'll read amazing stories in this book. There are chapters on Hickok, Plummer, Slade and Helm. The author was there at the time, and he quotes people who give first-hand accounts.

Great First Person History
Emerson Hough was a great Iowa writer who wrote about his own times, those of the Wild West!He keeps to the bare facts and was trying not to embellish his accounts of the outlaws.Even so, these stories are very vivid and colorful.I enjoy Hough's personal input on the subject of law and order (he thought the law, in his day, was ill-equipped to handle the "bad men") and it is interesting that he rode with Pat Garrett and others.I recommend this book to any western fan. ... Read more

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The Ulster Presbyterians, or "Scotch-Irish," to whom history has ascribed the dominant role among the pioneer folk of the Old Southwest, began their migrations to America in the latter years of the seventeenth century. It is not known with certainty precisely when or where the first immigrants of their race arrived in this country, but soon after 1680 they were to be found in several of the colonies. It was not long, indeed, before they were entering in numbers at the port of Philadelphia and were making Pennsylvania the chief center of their activities in the New World. By 1726 they had established settlements in several counties behind Philadelphia. Ten years later they had begun their great trek southward through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and on to the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. There they met others of their own race--bold men like themselves, hungry after land--who were coming in through Charleston and pushing their way up the rivers from the seacoast to the "Back Country," in search of homes.


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The Apache war chief Geronimo's story of his life. Originally published as "Geronimo; His Own Story". Geronimo also describes Apache culture and religion, and pleads for better treatment of his people by the United States. ... Read more

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"Oh, bury me out on th' lonesome prairie! Put a stone under my haid! Cover me up with a rope an' a saddle! 'Cause why? My true-love is daid * * * * * *"

It is impossible in cold print to indicate the mournful and long-drawn-out accent on the word "dead," to rhyme with head.

"Here comes Slim!" exclaimed one of the youthful cow punchers to his companions.

"As if we didn't know that, Dick!" laughed the slighter of two lads who, from their close resemblance, could be nothing less than brothers.

"His voice doesn't improve with age; does it, Nort?" asked Bud Merkel, smiling at his cousins, Norton and Richard Shannon.



Download The Boy Ranchers Among The Indians Now! ... Read more

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Two books collected in one edition formatted for the Kindle. Lnked Contents.

CONTENTS — LETTERS ON AN ELK HUNT
I. Connie Willis
II. The Start
III. Eden Valley
IV. Crazy Olaf and Others
V. Danyul and his Mother
VI. Elizabeth's Romance
VII. The Hunt
VIII. The Seventh Man
IX. An Indian Camp
X. The Tooth-Hunters
XI. Buddy and Baby Girl
XII. A Stampede
XIII. Nearing Home
XIV. The Memory-Bed

CONTENTS — LETTERS OF A WOMAN HOMESTEADER
I. The Arrival at Burnt Fork
II. Filing a Claim
III. A Busy, Happy Summer
IV. A Charming Adventure and Zebulon Pike
V. Sedalia and Regalia
VI. A Thanksgiving-Day Wedding
VII. Zebulon Pike visits his Old Home
VIII. A Happy Christmas
IX. A Confession
X. The Story of Cora Belle
XI. Zebbie's Story
XII. A Contented Couple
XIII. Proving Up
XIV. The New House
XV. The "Stocking-Leg" Dinner
XVI. The Horse-Thieves
XVII. At Gavotte's Camp
XVIII. The Homesteader's Marriage and a Little Funeral
XIX. The Adventure of the Christmas Tree
XX. The Joys of Homesteading
XXI. A Letter of Jerrine's
XXII. The Efficient Mrs. O'Shaughnessy
XXIII. How it Happened
XXIV. A Little Romance
XXV. Among the Mormons
XXVI. Success ... Read more

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In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports." This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people--to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly--I was about to say fearfully--growing!"[2:1] So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers like Professor von Holst, occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion.

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave--the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.


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The Whitney household, in the western part of Maine, was filled with sunshine, merriment and delight, on a certain winter evening a few years ago.

There was the quiet, thoughtful mother, now past her prime, but with many traces of the beauty and refinement that made her the belle of the little country town until Hugh Whitney, the strong-bearded soldier, who had entered the war as private and emerged therefrom with several wounds and with the eagles of a colonel on his shoulder, carried her away from all admirers and made her his bride.

Hugh had been absent a couple of weeks in Montana and Wyoming, whither he was drawn by a yearning of many years' standing to engage in the cattle business. He had received some tuition as a cowboy on the Llano Estacada, and the taste there acquired of the free, wild life, supplemented, doubtless, by his experience during the war, was held in restraint for a time only by his marriage.

The absence of the father was the only element lacking to make the household one of the happiest in that section of Maine; but the letter just received from him was so cheerful and affectionate that it added to the enjoyment of the family.

The two principal factors in this jollity were the twins and only children, Fred and Jennie, seventeen on their last birthday, each the picture of health, bounding spirits, love and devotion to their parents and to one another. They had been the life of the sleighing-parties and social gatherings, where the beauty of the budding Jennie attracted as much admiration as did that of her mother a score of years before, but the girl was too young to care for any of the ardent swains who were ready to wrangle for the privilege of a smile or encouraging word. Like a good and true daughter she had no secrets from her mother, and when that excellent parent said, with a meaning smile, "Wait a few years, Jennie," the girl willingly promised to do as she wished in that as in every other respect.



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Selected Documents and Photographs Relating to General Custer ... Read more

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This first-hand narrative of the life of Matthew Brayton, a seven-and-a-halfyear old white child of a settler who was kidnapped and sold many times by Native Americans in the beginning of the 19th century, probably doesn’t share all the gory details of his abuse when initially captured, but you can read between the lines. Still, this first-hand account does shed much light on what it was really like to come under the charge of many different Indian tribes. Although Brayton’s treatment was not entirely negative or positive, his frank and blunt story does much to dispel the romantic stories that have been perpetuated about young settlers’ children who became Indian chattel. It does much to tell true history and dispel any deliberate or accidental revisions.

In many cases the Indians treated Brayton well, but there can be no doubt that they stole from him and his family a life that would end up confused and stuck between two worlds. Although Brayton did finally unite with many of his natural family, he never stopped identifying with Native Americans, and he was forced to leave an Indian wife and child behind. In fact, when the War of Rebellion or Civil War broke out, Braytonenlisted and served in an American Indian brigade.

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Customer Reviews (1)

True, Non-PC History
This is a fascinating read of a first-hand account of what it was like to be kidnapped by Native Americans as a settler's child in the early 1800s.

The boy tells his story of being traded by various tribes for jugs of whiskey, his eventual though tentative acceptance by some of the tribes he live, fought and killed for and his eventual reuniting with his white family.

It is a blunt, action-filled story that is definitely not politicallycorrect. It is a slice of true history. A good read! ... Read more

Product Description