When Fort Sumter was attacked in April 1861, hundreds of soldiers were stationed at the U.S. Army’s Camp Floyd, forty miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The camp, established in June 1858, was t
In 1859, the American Fur Company set out on what would then be the longest steamboat trip in North American history—a headline-making, 6,200-mile trek along the Missouri River from St. Louis to Fort
Indian labor was vital to the early economic development of the Los Angeles region. This first volume in the new series Before Gold: California under Spain and Mexico explores for the first time Nativ
Leland Stanford is today a largely forgotten man. Yet he is the quintessence of the great American legend: the farm boy who makes good through hard work and struggle-the embodiment of the Horatio Alge
The Civil War left the western trails vulnerable and dangerous. Emigrants still streamed westward and demanded protection. The mail still had to be delivered, the telegraph protected. The newly minted
The only religious unit in American military history. The Mormon battalion was unique in federal service, having been recruited solely from one religious body and having a religious title as the unit
The complete history of steamboating on the Missouri RiverForming the most important river corridor in the trans-Mississippi West, the Missouri and its navigable tributaries were instrumental in openi
Following distinguished Civil War service that took one of his legs and rendered an arm useless, General George R. Maxwell was sent to Utah Territory and charged—first as Register of Land, then as U.S
The summer of 1865 marked the transition from the Civil War to Indian war on the western plains. With the rest of the country’s attention still focused on the East, the U.S. Army began an often forgot
When Horace Plunkett left Britain for the American West in 1879, seeking relief for lung problems, he launched a ranching career in Wyoming that influenced the cattle industry and altered the course o
Between 1896 and 1919, air pollution from large-scale copper smelting in northern California’s Shasta County severely damaged crops and timber in a 1,000-square-mile region, completely devastating a c
The entry for September 8, 1865, is terse: ?We marched and fought over 15 miles today.” With these few words civilian military engineer Lyman G. Bennett characterized the experience of the 1,400 men o
The slaughter of a wagon train of some 120 people in southern Utah on September 11, 1857, has long been the subject of controversy and debate. Innocent Blood gathers key primary sources describing the
Peter McAuslan heeded Mormon missionaries spreading the faith in his native Scotland in the mid-1840s. The uncertainty his family faced in a rapidly industrializing economy, the political turmoil erup
In 1849, William R. Goulding and the Knickerbocker Exploring Company struck out for California on the southern route—a road less traveled. This rare first-person diary of the southern Gold Rush trails
The most famous cattle town of the trail-driving era, Dodge City, Kansas, holds a special allure for western historians and enthusiasts alike. Wm. B. Shillingberg now goes beyond the violence for whic
A cooper and farmer from Ontario, Canada, Washington Peck (1801–89) spent decades traveling across the western frontier before finally settling in Washington Territory. Peck’s chronicle of his itinera
In the aftermath of the December 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, U.S. Army troops braced for retaliation from Lakota Sioux Indians, who had just suffered the devastating loss of at least two hundred me
