Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
American West
Americans have always envisioned a west. When they won independence from England in 1783, the west lay just beyond the Appalachian Mountains, a west celebrated in the adventures of Daniel Boone. Then, people began to thread through the Cumberland Gap to make new homes there.
Thomas Berger, the author of a classic novel of the American West, speaks about its long-awaited sequel, and about what is to be learned in the challenging territory that lies between history and fiction.
In 1992, American Heritage asked various historians, artists, and writers to name their candidate for best historical novel.
Our greatest Western novelist deciphers Crazy Horse, Custer, and the hard year of the Little Bighorn
From law officer to murderer to Hollywood consultant: the strange career of a man who became myth
Late in his life, Henry Fonda, at dinner with a producer named Melvin Shestack, recalled meeting an old man who said he had firsthand knowledge of a memorable Fonda character, Wyatt Earp, the legendary frontier lawman of John Ford’s classic My Darli
Poisoned, ruined, and self-cannibalized, this city is still the grandest of all boomtowns.
It’s spooky up here on the top floor of the Metals Bank & Trust Building. Shards of glass and crumbled plaster crunch underfoot, obscuring the elegant tile pattern of the corridor floor. Heavy oak doors with pebbled windows and missing knobs stand open to the hallway.
It belonged to Taos’ most influential family until well into the 20th century, but this unadorned adobe hacienda speaks of the earliest days of Spanish occupation of the Southwest.
In 1804, a Pueblo Indian sold his four-room adobe house in the farming community of Taos, New Mexico, to Don Severino Martínez, a Spanish trader.
First heard just a century ago at the Chicago fair, Frederick Jackson Turner’s epochal essay on the Western frontier expressed a conflict in the American psyche that still tears at us.
This country’s long, acrimonious observance of the Columbian quincentenary is finally over, but it won’t be soon forgotten.
150 years ago, a sea of grass spread from the Ohio to the Rockies. Now, only bits and pieces of that awesome wilderness remain for the traveler to discover.
Behind my grandparents’ house, the house in which I was born, rose a high pasture, little used in my boyhood and then only for grazing a few head of cattle.
“Why hasn't the stereotype faded away as real cowboys become less and less typical of Western life? Because we can't or won't do without it, obviously.”
Being a Westerner is not simple. If you live, say, in Los Angeles, you live in the second-largest city in the nation, urban as far as the eye can see in every direction except west.
Much has changed in Utah since World War II, but, outside of the metropolitan center in the Salt Lake Valley, the addiction to rural simplicity and the idea of home is still strong.
For many children who accompanied their parents west across the continent in the 1840s and '50s, the journey was a supreme adventure.
The historian Francis Parkman, strolling around Independence, Missouri in 1846, remarked upon the “multitude of healthy children’s faces … peeping out from under the covers of the wagons.” Two decades later, a traveler there wrote of husbands packing up “sunb
Before there were Western states, there were public lands—over a billion acres irrevocably reserved for the people of the United States. The Sagebrush Rebels are the most recent in a series of covetous groups bent on “regaining” what was never theirs.
The Story of Some Forgotten Four-Footed Pioneers
Until recently the history of the American West has been dominated by the elite, the spectacular, and the gaudy, not by the ordinary folk—the “little people with dirty faces,” who are only now beginning to get their due.
An exploration into the exploration of America
By the 1890’s, when Denver telegrapher George Lawton began collecting the curious photographs on this and the following pages, the era of the Western badmen was coming to an end.
The Last Stand of King Grizzly
Bears and people have been at war for a long time-possibly longer than two predatory mammals should be, with any hope of mutual survival. In the beginning, the bears won almost every time, though not as often as the great cats did.
People who have been turned out of their homes make keen historians. Forced from the land of their ancestors and onto the open road without a destination, they have a way of remembering—often to the minute of the day—the trauma of departure.
Charles Marion Russell, born outside St. Louis, in Oak Hill, Missouri, of a locally prominent family in 1864, came west to Montana Territory four days short of his sixteenth birthday.
What started as fun and games at spring roundups is now a multi-million-dollar sport called rodeo
The crowd roars. The bell clangs. The chute gate swings wide and a beleaguered animal dashes into the arena to put on an exciting exhibition of pain and panic.
The shore line of Pyramid Lake, one of the West's great natural wonders, is steadily receding, robbed of the water it needs by a Bureau of Reclamation irrigation project.
On January 10, 1844, Lieutenant John C.
In a strange message to the intriguing General Wilkinson, the soldier-explorer seemed to predict his own geographical befuddlement and his capture by the Spanish.
William Ashley was largely responsible for the development of that most glittering of the West’s romantic figures, the mountain man—the free trapper who explored the western wilderness at imminent peril of his life.
Medicine was primitive and their knowledge of it limited, but in their hazardous journey to the Pacific, Lewis and Clark lost only one patient
To David Thompson—who died blind, penniless, and bypassed by history—we owe our first knowledge of the American continent’s rugged Northwest
Legend says the frontier was “hell on women,” but the ladies claim they had the time of their lives
Both grimness and beauty touch this haunting fragment of America’s past
This is an old tale, and not a pretty one; it is a true tale, a real “Western,” although it wouldn’t go on TV. It sounds to me like a ballad—the ballad of Cynthia Ann.
Never again can there be a hunting party as gay or as risky as the one Sir William Stewart devised in 1843
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