Historical American West

Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States and commander of the Union forces in the Civil War, tells the story of his life in his own words. In this opening volume, Grant covers his early years, including his time at the U.S. military academy at West Point and his service during the Mexican War under Zachary Taylor. Grant wrote his memoirs in order to rescue his family from debt and they were published as he lay dying of throat cancer. Today, they are an American classic.

Having fled Japanese-occupied Korea for the gleaming promise of the United States with nothing but four dollars and a suitcase full of Shakespeare to his name, the young, idealistic Chungpa Han arrives in a New York teeming with expatriates, businessmen, students, scholars, and indigents. Struggling to support his studies, he becomes a traveling salesman, a domestic worker, and a farmer, and observing along the way the idealism, greed, and shifting values of the industrializing 20th century. East Goes West casts a sharply satirical eye on the demands and perils of assimilation.

In early November 1834, an aristocratic young couple from Savannah and South Carolina sailed from New York and began a seventeen-year odyssey in West Africa. Leighton and Jane Wilson sailed along what was for them an exotic coastline, visited cities and villages, and sometimes ventured up great rivers and followed ancient paths.

Our American West, Volume 4 completes the collection of historical stories written by Gary McCarthy. These include tales of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which proved once and for all that the storied and hoped for river across America didn't exist. That long before the Gold Rush of 1849, a diminutive but courageous priest, Fr. Junipero Serra, sacrificed everything to bring Christianity to the coastal Native Americans, while faithfully establishing a string of beautiful California missions.

Our American West, Volume 3 is filled with western frontier stories you’ll find entertaining. "The Roadrunner – Our Sagebrush Clowns" reflects on the speedy and often comical bird of our southwestern deserts. Wild and wicked Calamity Jane lived up to her reputation as the West’s most infamous outlaw woman. “The Donner Party – Frozen Horror” describes the horror that led to cannibalism. The 49er Gold Rush ruined the lives of two ambitious and well-intentioned men, John Augustus Sutter and John Marshal...

How could Annie Oakley, a woman of barely 110 pounds with a childlike beauty, beat so many of the greatest sharpshooters with her skill and talent? The name is probably familiar to most people, but not many know about her early life or her great love for her husband, who was also a sharpshooter. We are taking you back more than a century to meet one of the greatest American folklore heroines who ever existed.

Our American West, Volume 2 begins with America’s first colonizers, the prairie dogs, and how out on the ranges they were so hated by ranchers that they were almost made extinct. Conestoga Wagons were once called “prairie schooners” crossing America long before the famed Pony Express. The indomitable courage of Sarah Winnemucca, the “Prairie Princess” rivals that of a tall Swede named Showshoe Thompson who skied the snowy river passes of the Sierra Nevadas.

The separate lives of these driven men and independent women from Europe and America are drawn to a common destiny that beckons seductively from the wild and remote flanks of the American West.

David Forsyth recounts the life of Eben Smith, an integral but little-known figure in Colorado mining history. From Smith’s early years and his labor in the mines, to his rise to prominence as an investor and developer, Forsyth shows how Smith used the mining and milling knowledge he acquired in California to become a leader in technological innovation in Colorado’s mining industry.

An unexpected convergence of events sets in motion the thrilling, yet heartrending conclusion of Book Two, setting the stage for the arduous crossing of the Continental Divide, and the passionate tumult of the next Maps of Fate era novel of the Threads West, An American Saga series: Uncompahgre.

Key West, 1886. The booming cigar industry makes it the most prosperous city in Florida. As a rebel base for the anticolonial insurgency in Cuba, it’s also a tinderbox for six young friends with ambitious dreams. They all brim with secrets.

Cash McLendon, reluctant hero of the epic Indian battle at Adobe Walls, has journeyed to Mountain View in the Arizona Territory with one goal: to convince Gabrielle Tirrito that he's a changed man and win her back from schoolteacher Joe Saint. As they're about to depart by stage for their new life in San Francisco, Gabrielle is kidnapped by enforcer Killer Boots, who is working on orders from crooked St. Louis businessman Rupert Douglass.

In Our American West, Volume 1, discover humor, tragedy, and courage in every one of these delightful stories. Gary McCarthy has been writing about the American West for 30 years and these are some of his favorite topics written - not for the expert or scholar - but for all the armchair admirers of thing historically written.

1800’s American West—a place where men find themselves in harsh and cruel circumstances and where lives are short lived. Traveling independently on the expansive road through the west, cowboy and Westerner Tomas H. Elkman is a man of the times. To ease the loneliness of the trail while searching for gainful employment, Elkman warily teams up with a fight-prone, good-timing gambler by the name of Jefferson McGredy. This strange pairing of men is hired to deliver an assemblage of horses to a ranch in the untamed northern territory.

In Uncompahgre, the number one best-selling, multiple award winning, third novel of the Threads West Series, the time nears when the first of the next generation of Threads West characters will be born of the brave men and courageous women of different origins who have come so far and risked all. The men and women of the saga, having reached their initial destination, pre-Denver, Cherry Creek, are each faced with life-altering decisions.

The yerar 1914: Ram Singh arrives in the Imperial Valley on the Mexican border, reluctantly accepting his friend Karak’s offer of work and partnership in a small cantaloupe farm. Ram is unmoored; fleeing violence in Oregon, he desperately longs to return to his wife and newborn son in Punjab - but he is duty bound to make his fortune first. In the Valley, American settlement is still new and the rules are ever shifting.

In this cutting-edge interpretation of the late 19th-century United States, Cameron Blevins argues that the US Post wove together two of the era's defining projects: western expansion and the growth of state power. Between the 1860s and the early 1900s, the western United States underwent a truly dramatic reorganization of people, land, capital, and resources. Paper Trails maps the spread of the US Post using a dataset of more than 100,000 post offices, revealing a new picture of the federal government in the West.

Cash McLendon has always had an instinct for self-preservation, one that was honed by an impoverished childhood and life with an alcoholic father barely scraping by on the streets of Saint Louis in 1872. He’s always had a knack for finding and capitalizing on the slightest opportunities, choosing the path of financial security over happiness or real friends. He eventually builds himself up from a Saint Louis street urchin to the son-in-law and heir apparent to industrial mogul Rupert Douglass. Though it lacks passion, his life seems securely set: a wife, a career, property, standing.

Famous Heroes of the American West is a lively account of the "Wild West" and its renowned figures, narrated with vigor by Adam Sims. The lives of Davy Crockett, Christopher Kit" Carson, Calamity Jane, and Sitting Bull, among others, are explored in detail. Their exploits, adventures, and alliances make for fascinating listening.

John Stuart Tapscott, after service to the Confederacy and his home state of Virginia, heads westward to find a life that doesn't resemble a mockery of everything he's ever known. After brief stops, he finds himself an adopted member of a small band of Osage that have wandered to Texas. A series of events thereafter display the necessity to him of his leaving his new family and trekking further.