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Figures in a Western Landscape: Men and Women of the Northern Rockies (Creating the North American Landscape)

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The northern Rocky Mountains and adjacent high plains were the last American West. Here used to be the final enactment of our national drama – the last explorations, the final battles of the Indian wars, the closing of the frontier.
In Figures in a Western Landscape, award-winning biographer Elizabeth Stevenson humanizes the history of the region with a procession of individual lives moving across the generations. Each of the sixteen women and men depicted has left in the back of his or her own unique written record or oral history. They have bequeathed to us stories that are rich in revealing anecdote and colorful detail. Among them:
Meriwether Lewis, The united states’s “most introspective explorer,” whose journals give you the first English-language record of the Northwest’s rivers, mountains, and plains – and offer a memorable account of how their newness struck his imagination.
John Kirk Townsend, a number of the first Western explorers who sought neither personal wealth nor fame but the advancement of scientific knowledge. Known to the friendly Chinooks as “the bird chief,” he lacked the artistic skills of his recent, Audubon, and relied instead on gathering specimens (and used to be more than once forced by hunger to eat them).
James and Granville Stuart, early settlers lured by rumors of gold in the 1850s, who crossed three dangerous rivers on a 150-mile trek through the wilderness because they had heard rumors of an even rarer commodity – books. (They bought five, at the “very stiff” price of five dollars apiece: a volume each of Shakespeare and Byron, a life of Napoleon, a French Bible, and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.)
Pretty-Shield, wife of the Crow scout who warned Custer to turn back at Little Big Horn, who “hated no one, not even the white man,” and who told her story to an astonished interpreter in the 1930s.
In a concluding chapter, Stevenson draws on in the past unpublished material to reveal new information about Martha Jane Cannary Burke, better referred to as Calamity Jane, the woman who could ride, shoot, and drive a mule team in addition to any man (but who once failed to “pass” because she didn’t cuss her mules like one) and who lies buried in Deadwood, South Dakota, next to the man some said used to be her husband, Wild Bill Hickok.
These and other women and men whose stories Stevenson tells all helped to shape – and were in turn shaped by – the uniquely challenging landscape of The united states’s “last West.” Their words and actions, here rediscovered, give vivid color to a climactic chapter in American history.

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