Cowboy and drifter Frank Clifford lived a lot of lives—and raised a lot of hell—in the first quarter of his life. The number of times he changed his name—Clifford being just one of them—suggests that he often traveled just steps ahead of the law. During the 1870s and 1880s his restless spirit led him all over the Southwest, crossing the paths of many of the era’s most notorious characters, most notably Clay Allison and Billy the Kid. More than just an entertaining and informative narrative of his Wild West adventures, Clifford’s memoir also paints a picture of how ranchers and ordinary folk lived, worked, and stayed alive during those tumultuous years. Written in 1940 and edited and annotated by Frederick Nolan, Deep Trails in the Old West is likely one of the last eyewitness histories of the old West ever to be discovered. As Frank Clifford, the author rode with outlaw Clay Allison’s Colfax County vigilantes, traveled with Charlie Siringo, cowboyed on the Bell Ranch, contended with Apaches, and mined for gold in Hillsboro. In 1880 he was one of the Panhandle cowboys sent into New Mexico to recover cattle stolen by Billy the Kid and his compañeros—and in the process he got to know the Kid dangerously well. In unveiling this work, Nolan faithfully preserves Clifford’s own words, providing helpful annotation without censoring either the author’s strong opinions or his racial biases. For all its roughness, Deep Trails in the Old West is a rich resource of frontier lore, customs, and manners, told by a man who saw the Old West at its wildest—and lived to tell the tale.

A history of the saloon as an institution of the Old West illustrated with contemporary photographs and line drawings.

A riveting and previously untold history of the American West, as seen by the pioneering women who advocated for their rights amidst challenges of migration and settlement, and transformed the country in the process Between 1840 and 1910, hundreds of thousands of men and women traveled deep into the underdeveloped American West, lured by adventure, opportunity, and the spirit of Manifest Destiny. These settlers soon realized that survival in a new society required women to compromise eastern sensibilities and take on some of their husbands’ responsibilities. At a time when women had very few legal or economic--much less political--rights, these women soon proved just as essential as men to westward expansion. During the mid-nineteenth century, the traditional domestic model of womanhood shifted to include public service, with the women of the West becoming town mothers who established schools, churches, and philanthropies, while also coproviding for their families. They claimed their own homesteads and graduated from new, free coeducational colleges that provided career alternatives to marriage. In 1869, the men of the Wyoming Territory gave women the right to vote--partly to persuade more of them to move west--but with this victory in hand, western suffragists fought relentlessly until the rest of the region followed suit. By 1914 western women became the first American women to vote--a right still denied to women in every eastern state. In New Women in the Old West, Winifred Gallagher brings to life the riveting history of the little-known women--the White, Black, and Asian settlers, and the Native Americans and Hispanics they displaced--who played monumental roles in one of America's most transformative periods. Drawing on an extraordinary collection of research, Gallagher weaves together the striking legacy of the persistent individuals who not only created homes on weather-wracked prairies, but also played a vital, unrecognized role in the women's rights movement and forever redefined the "American woman."

"From Lewis and Clark's epic 1803 expedition to the showmanship of Buffalo Bill, the story of the American West is epic in scope, full of amazing tales of tragedy and triumph ... Illustrated with ... photographs and ... maps, [this book] is [a] ... history of a time and place that forever lives in legend"--

DIVDramatic story of shoulder arms, hand guns, and other weapons also describes the men who used them. Detailed descriptions and illustrations of the Kentucky and Sharps rifle, Colt revolver, and much more. 499 black-and-white illustrations. /div

Contains over five hundred-fifty illustrated photographs of stetsons, boots, spurs, saddles, chaps and other trappings of the American western cowboy and cowgirl and traces the history of the cowboy from the cattle trails of the old west to the wild west shows and rodeos.

This work is an explanation of the role of the nineteenth-century photographer as a conscious historian of the West - a recorder of events, people, and places as surely as they were the diary-keepers, journalists, and writers. Like them, he exercised choice in what he recorded; unlike them, he documented aspects of reality that we can know in no other way. Photographers as documenters are too often casually, even carelessly, regarded. Photography And The Old West is intended to convey as clearly as possible how people learned to use a camera and became camera-wise in an individual way; how tools and materials affected photographic seeing; and what a few of the many photographers hoped to express. This work is not a comprehensive survey but rather a selective look at some of the imagery of the West that a few conscious photographers produced.