A storyteller and avid fly fisherman, Jeff Metcalf is, for compelling personal reasons, an enhanced observer of the human condition, who finds himself often in the streams of the American West. Not only rivers run through his essays, his cancer does too. But so do camaraderie, adventures, reveling in nature and outdoor devotions, and the sheer bliss of focused engagement with the fish and the cast. Metcalf’s keenly observed companions are river guides, small-town locals, academics, and other city folk, all like him among those who run to the river for solace and joy.
 
These essays are much more than fish stories; they reveal the community and communion of fishing and the bonds to place the author nurtured through it. Whether he recalls carousing and tale-swapping with friends or excellence found through the challenge of the cast, Metcalf’s words, sometimes roiling and turbulent, sometimes calm and reflective, like a western river, vividly convey the pull of the steelhead and the fight for survival. Whether or not you fish, Metcalf’s sharp-eyed, open and honest look at life will draw you in.

"These waters have been my home, and I fish them more than most. In truth, they have saved my life on more than a few occasions. I seek refuge in the quiet solitude of rivers, and in dark hours of my life—including this particular year—I need desperately to be fly-fishing." —From the book
 

Strap on your snake chaps and slap on some sunscreen as biologist Jennifer Bové takes you out to the field in the company of biologists working on the frontlines of wildlife studies, botany, and resource management. This exuberant and entertaining collection of stories ranges from Myanmar to the Midwest, from Argentina to Alaska and many points in between, offering tales that are by turns thoughtful, funny, tragic, and just-plain-crazy.

During five years of working in snake-ridden sloughs and rough northern seas, Jennifer Bové often asked herself 'Why am I doing this?' Realizing her own experiences were only the tip of the iceberg, she invited friends and colleagues to answer the same question. The result is stories that include deadly snakebites, a plague of marmots, special delivery skunk oil, bald eagle wrangling, and a mountain goat loose in the galley of a research vessel. These adventures are the details behind the data collected by these men and women driven to unlock nature’s truths. In The Back Road to Crazy, seasoned researchers and novices alike reveal the impulse to trade the comfort of a more sheltered career for demanding physical labor, whims of weather, and the company of unruly creatures.

The image of the Jew solely as urbanite may stem from the period of 1880 to 1920, when two million Jews left their homes in Eastern Europe and established themselves in the urban centers of America. Lesser known are the agrarian efforts of Jewish immigrants. In Back to the Soil, Robert Goldberg focuses on the attempt of one such Jewish colony in Clarion, Utah. In 1911, eighty-one families left eastern cities to farm the Clarion tract. Jewish families funded the venture, the governor of Utah en-couraged it, and the Mormon Church financially aided the community. Despite these efforts, Clarion died as an organizational entity in 1916, with the dozen remaining families departing by the mid-1920s.

Goldberg sheds light on the values and ideals of the colonists, the daily rhythm of life, the personalities of the settlers, and the struggle for and eventual collapse of their dream. Of all the attempts to establish a Jewish colony on the land, Clarion was the largest and had the longest existence of any colony west of the Appalachians. The Clarion fragment, lost and forgotten, thus becomes a crucial part of the larger mosaic of Jewish history in the West.

Release of this new paperback edition is timed to coincide with the celebration of the centennial of the founding of the Clarion colony.
 

Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize

Bad Summon explores the relationship between the majesty of nature and the quiet violence humans inflict upon themselves and others. The poems are dipped in loss, traveling between death and mountains, romance and rivers. They are addicted to the truth of experience and the energy behind regret. Bad Summon conjures its own ghost. According to David Baker, the judge who selected the winning manuscript, this is a “surprising, coherent, original collection of lyric poems. I felt peril, heartbreak, catastrophe, sorrow, genuine soulfulness. It’s also funny, yet its humor is not comic but possesses a terrible gravity.” This is a volume every poetry lover will want to explore.

[In this one we aren’t exactly drowning]
but we are falling through water.
Quieter than we expect. Churning
is how we’ll later describe it.
Our arms dig out two wet Cs,
a heart if you want to look at it
that way. Though the body is always
in between—that unoriginal arrow. 

The life of I. J. 'Izzi' Wagner mirrors the development of Salt Lake City during the twentieth century—from poverty and obscurity to affluence and prominence. Wagner was born in poverty, but through hard work, wise management, and good luck, he built a fortune. He also changed the city for the better—leading the movement to eliminate overhead signs on Main Street, opening the southwest quadrant to controlled industrial development, ridding the city center of railroad tracks, funding the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts, and using his substantial influence to promote tolerance.

His sense of humor was legendary. His tenacity in pursuit of goals was unwavering. His grasp of past, present, and future opportunities was profound. Bags to Riches shows the personal side of an 'outsider' who became an 'insider' through congeniality, good humor, and integrity.

During the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–1878, Russian troops, Cossack auxiliaries, and local Bulgarians participated in what today would be called ethnic cleansing. Tensions in the Balkans between Christians and Muslims ended in disaster when hundreds of thousands of Muslims were massacred, raped, and forced to flee from Bulgaria to Turkey as their villages were sacked and their homes destroyed.
 
In this book, William H. Holt tells the story of a people and moment in time that has largely been neglected in modern Turkish and Balkan memory. Holt uncovers the reasons for this mass forgetting, finding context both within the development of the modern Turkish state and the workings of collective memory. Bringing together a wide array of eyewitness accounts, the book provides unprecedented detail on the plight of the Muslim refugees in their flight from Bulgaria, in Istanbul, and in their resettlement in Anatolia. In crisp, clear, and engaging prose, Holt offers an insightful analysis of human suffering and social memory.

This volume constitutes one of the earliest and most comprehensive ethnographic reconnaissance of the Western Shoshoni and some of their Northern Paiute, Ute, and Southern Paiute neighbors of the Great Basin. At the same time, it tries to ascertain the types of Shoshonean sociopolitical groups and to discover their ecological and social determinants.

First published in 1938 as the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 120, this study is a classic in the field of Great Basin ethnology. Steward is considered one of the foremost exponents of cultural evolution in the United States, and his work is a major contribution to the study of social organization and to North American ethnography.

For decades archaeologists insisted that southwestern cultures such as the Anasazi, Hohokam, and Mogollon had little or no relation to peoples south of the "border"' Now American archaeology is beginning to take seriously the notion that goods, gods, and even humans may have passed with some frequency between the high cultures of Mexico and the Southwest.

In his latest book, Carroll Riley presents an ambitious overview of the continuities he sees in the geographically vast and culturally complex American Southwest and the adjacent northwest of Mexico. Aided by extensive illustrations, he argues that although the Southwest remained "southwestern" in its basic economy, there were drastic changes beginning around A.D. 1200 that transformed socio-religious life throughout the region. Riley calls this period Aztlan, a name adopted from the mythic Aztec land of origin. A Pueblo Indian in A.D. 800 would have gathered and farmed the same foods as his descendants, but by 1400 those distant relatives had a very different concept of the physical and spiritual universe.

In addition to bringing vast erudition and jargon-free prose to bear on a complex subject, Riley’s conclusions have potentially sweeping implications for the future of archaeological studies in the greater Southwest.

The story of one of the longest-lived and most successful nomadic enclaves in North America provides a rare glimpse into the material expressions of Apache self-determination and survival. For nearly 200 years the Jicarilla Apache of New Mexico thrived in the interstices of Pueblo and Spanish settlements following their expulsion from the Plains. Critical to their success was their ability to extend key aspects of Plains-Pueblo exchange to Indian and mixed-blood communities on the fringes of colonial rule. More than other nomadic tribes, the Jicarilla played an enormous role in holding together the social fabric of New Mexican villages after the fall of the Spanish Empire.

This comprehensive study by Sunday Eiselt begins with the great Athapaskan migration out of Canada during prehis-toric times and ends with the forced settlement of the Jicarilla on the Dulce reservation in the 1880s. Eiselt combines archaeological and ethno­historical data in an examination of Jicarilla strategies for self-preservation. She reveals the ideological and political imperatives of “­belonging” that shaped their interactions with local communities and the state and that enabled them to avoid reservation life well into the 1880s. Throughout their long history, Jicarilla identity remained intact, distinctive, and discernable even as life on the reservation disrupted the intimate connections that once existed with their Hispanic and Pueblo neighbors.
 

Behavioral archaeology is an emerging branch of anthropology emphasizing the study of relationships between human behavior and artifacts (material culture) in all times and places. As such, it aspires to make contributions beyond the confines of archaeology to other behavioral sciences and to society in general.

Behavioral Archaeology is a selection of writings by Michael Schiffer, one of the field’s primary proponents. The chapters include important works published between 1972 and 1987, the formative period of behavioral archaeology. Schiffer has crafted a lengthy introduction to the coume, a personal history that contextualizes the development of these works. Also new is the last chapter, which lists—and keys to the preceding chapters—the field’s most important principles, tenets, and premises.

Readers will discover that although behavioral archaeologist have put archaeological inference on a scientific footing and have fostered the growth of experimental archaeology and ethnoarchaeology as research strategies, behavioral archaeology is not confined to methodology.

Indeed, cultivation of the fields established here is leading to the development of new behavioral science focused on studies of people-artifact interactions. By closely juxtaposing method and theory, principles and applications, science and history, this book illustrates the coherence and scope of behavioral archaeology’s conceptual framework.

Sondra Jones traces the metamorphosis of the Ute people from a society of small, interrelated bands of mobile hunter-gatherers to sovereign, dependent nations—modern tribes who run extensive business enterprises and government services. Weaving together the history of all Ute groups—in Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico—the narrative describes their traditional culture, including the many facets that have continued to define them as a people. Jones emphasizes how the Utes adapted over four centuries and details events, conflicts, trade, and social interactions with non-Utes and non-Indians. Being and Becoming Ute examines the effects of boarding—and public—school education; colonial wars and commerce with Hispanic and American settlers; modern world wars and other international conflicts; battles over federally instigated termination, tribal identity, and membership; and the development of economic enterprises and political power. The book also explores the concerns of the modern Ute world, including social and medical issues, transformed religion, and the fight to maintain Ute identity in the twenty-first century.
 
Neither a portrait of a people frozen in a past time and place nor a tragedy in which vanishing Indians sank into oppressed oblivion, the history of the Ute people is dynamic and evolving. While it includes misfortune, injustice, and struggle, it reveals the adaptability and resilience of an American Indian people.

Biotic Communities catalogs and defines by biome, or biotic community, the region centered on Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Baja California Norte, plus California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Texas, Coahuila, Sinaloa, and Baja California Sur. Originally published in 1982 by the Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum, this ambitious book is still a "must-have" for those working in natural resources management and ecological research, as well as non-specialists who wish to know more about a particular locale.

Biotic Communities is arranged by climatic formation with a short chapter for each biome describing climate, physiognomy, distribution, dominant and common plant species, and characteristic vertebrates. Subsequent chapters contain careful descriptions of zonal subdivisions. The text is supplemented with over one hundred black and white photographs illustrating almost every community type.

 

Winner of the Wallace Stegner Prize in American Environmental or Western History

Fredrick Swanson tells the story of Guy M. Brandborg and his impact on the practices of the U.S. Forest Service. As supervisor of Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest from 1935 to 1955, Brandborg engaged in a management style that promoted not only the well-being of the forest community but also the social and economic welfare of the local people. By relying on selective cutting, his goal was to protect the watersheds and wildlife habitats that are devastated by clear-cutting, and to prevent the job losses that follow such practices. Following his retirement, he became concerned that his agency was deviating from the practice of sustained-yield management of the forest’s timber lands, and led a highly visible public outcry that became known as the Bitterroot controversy. Brandborg’s behind-the-scenes lobbying contributed materially to the passage of the National Forest Management Act of 1976, the single most important law affecting public forestry since the creation of the Forest Service.

It is difficult to piece together existing records that describe the migrations of African Americans in the nineteenth-century American West. Efforts to assemble collections of oral histories, images, diaries, and other written documents on the black experience in the Western United States and Canada have proven surprisingly fruitful, however, and the rewarding culmination of such research flourished in the archival images found in this second edition of John Ravage’s Black Pioneers.

Using public and private collections in every western state and in Canada, Ravage has gathered more than three hundred photographs, line drawings, lithographs, stereoviews, and other images. This new edition also adds sections on black entertainers and ranchers, a chapter on the dating of historic photographs and their genealogical significance, as well as an expanded bibliography. All aid understanding of the black frontier experience.

Ravage goes beyond the stereotypical photography of the era, which often reflected white fears and prejudices, to present the works of frontier photographers. Galveston’s Lucius Harper, Denver’s John Green, and the Northwest’s nomadic James Presley Ball all bring life to their subjects and meaning to their presence in the American West. Black Pioneers is a vibrant visual document of the profound influence blacks had on communal and frontier history.

How does one bring poetry to a community? And who is going to make it happen? In response to these questions posed by the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, Katharine Coles and a cadre of poets and artists provide this essential guide and inspiration. Blueprints creates for poets and arts organizers the sense that they are part of a larger, noble endeavor based in shared values and commitment to poetry. The first three sections include essays by a dozen poets and artists about the ways they have brought poetry into different kinds of communities. These essays demonstrate what has been done and what can be done and will inspire others to bring poetry into their own communities. The final section provides a practical "toolkit" loaded with experience-based advice and the tools and strategies necessary to acocmplish those endeavors.

Essayists:
Elizabeth Alexander
Sherwin Bitsui
Lee Briccetti
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Dana Gioia
Robert Hass
Bas Kwakman
Thomas Lux
Christopher Merrill
Luis Rodriguez
Anna Deavere Smith
Patricia Smith

Contributors to the Toolkit:
Elizabeth Allen
Susan Boskoff
Katharine Coles
Tree Swenson
Orlando White

"What is it about these borderland cats which has so fired up people? Scarcity combined with beauty explains some of the appeal. So does the animal’s legendary strength and power as befits its role as the region’s top predator. The jaguar’s neotropical origins also add to its mystique...But there is something more. That such a large cat is out there somewhere...invokes the depths of our imagination. Nor does it matter one whit that the chance of any one individual actually seeing one is almost nil. The thought of such a cat’s presence is enough in itself."—from the book

In 1996 a rancher hunting mountain lions just north of the Arizona-Mexico border treed a jaguar. Instead of reaching for a rifle, the rancher went for his camera. Later that year another party photographed a jaguar in Arizona’s Baboquivari Mountains. These compelling photographs sparked public interest in jaguars and have resulted in calls for listing jaguars as an endangered species.

Borderland Jaguars documents the human-jaguar contact in the Southwest and presents jaguar folklore from both sides of the border. But the book is primarily a natural history of the jaguar, and discusses its distribution, habitats, and hunting and breeding characteristics before concluding with a section on the status and management of borderland jaguars, and a proposed conservation plan. Written in an engaging style, and replete with a wealth of photographs, Borderland Jaguars is a wonderful introduction to this elusive resident of the Southwest.

Bridging the Distance examines a number of the problems and prospects of the rural West that have largely been neglected by scholars. The issues are considered in four sections—Defining the Rural West, Community, Economy, and Land Use—each with an introduction by editor David Danbom. The essays highlight factors that set the region apart from the rest of the country and provide varied perspectives on challenges faced by those living in often isolated areas. Contributors cover matters such as a hazing incident that divided a small Colorado town and the effects of media coverage; challenges in areas of Montana and Wyoming where the ideas of new exurbanites regarding natural resources differ from those of long-time residents; conflict between surface water and ground water users in Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska; and the shortcomings of health care among Latino immigrants in rural California. Essays on rural economy suggest how states can better use fiscal policies to advance long-term economic health and how resources can be exploited in ways that are both environmentally and economically sustainable. On the question of land use, one essay shares the viewpoint of a ranching family in Nevada that has long struggled with the government over grazing cattle on federal lands. Another examines the case of the Goshute Indians of Skull Valley, whose efforts to use their reservation for nuclear waste storage roused the ire of the state of Utah.

The essays in Bridging the Distance are fresh, informative, and insightful examinations of the complex problems facing the rural West. This is a book that will spur both conversations and the search for solutions.