“[These reminiscences] light up for whoever will read the earliest days of early English-speaking Texas.” —J. Frank Dobie, from the foreword
A firsthand account of pioneer life in east Texas.
Although today he is virtually unknown, during his lifetime Cummings was one of the most famous newspapermen in the United States, in part because of stories like these. Complete with a biographical sketch and historical introduction, A Remarkable Curiosity is an enjoyable read for anybody interested in the American West in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The early plans for Mount Rushmore called for blasting heroic likenesses of mountain men--Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and John Colter-—into the solid mountain granite of South Dakota. Readers of this colorful volume will see the heroics and the brutally rugged individualism that made these fur trappers candidates for legend and infamy.
The accounts of the mountain men are spun from the experiences of a nation moving westward: a trapper returns from the dead; hunters feast on buffalo intestines served on a dirty blanket; a missionary woman is astounded by the violence and vulgarity of the trappers’ rendezvous. These are just a few of the narratives, tall tales, and just plain lies that make up A Rendezvous Reader.
The writers represented in this book include a dyed-in-the wool trappers, adventuring European nobles, upward-gazing eastern missionaries, and just plain hacks who never unsheathed a Green River knife or traveled farther west that the Ohio River. What these writers have in common is that all of them, whether they dealt mostly in fact of entirely in fantasy, helped to create a uniquely American icon: the mountain man.
Though A Rendezvous Reader will certainly be of interest to the historian and the historically curious, the true purpose of this anthology is to bring together in one volume the liveliest most readable accounts by and about the mountain men. Whether you sample or devour this anthology of mountain horrors and delights, it is a book guaranteed to entertain as well as inform.
A vivid description of Colorado’s beginnings
This is the first single-volume history of the Colorado territory, encompassing the entire territorial period from the beginning of the Civil War to 1876, when Colorado became a state. The Rise of the Centennial State traces the growth of the territory as new technologies increased mining profits and as new modes of transportation--especially the Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific railroads--opened the territory to eastern markets, bringing waves of settlers to farm, ranch, and establish new communities.
Eugene H. Berwanger's history is packed with colorful characters and portraits of sprawling, brawling frontier and mining towns from Denver to Central City. He presents a multifaceted discussion of Colorado's resurgence after the war, with rich discussions of the role of minorities in the territory’s development: Indian-white relations (including discussions of now forgotten battles of Beecher’s Island and Summit Springs, which destroyed the Indians’ hold on the Colorado Plains); the social segregation of blacks in Denver; and Mexican Americans’ displeasure at being separated from the Hispano culture of New Mexico. Berwanger also demonstrates the decisive role of Colorado’s admission to statehood in swinging the disputed presidential election of 1876 to the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes.
A provocative case that “failed states” along the periphery of today’s international system are the intended result of nineteenth-century colonial design.
From the Afghan frontier with British India to the pampas of Argentina to the deserts of Arizona, nineteenth-century empires drew borders with an eye toward placing indigenous people just on the edge of the interior. They were too nomadic and communal to incorporate in the state, yet their labor was too valuable to displace entirely. Benjamin Hopkins argues that empires sought to keep the “savage” just close enough to take advantage of, with lasting ramifications for the global nation-state order.
Hopkins theorizes and explores frontier governmentality, a distinctive kind of administrative rule that spread from empire to empire. Colonial powers did not just create ad hoc methods or alight independently on similar techniques of domination: they learned from each other. Although the indigenous peoples inhabiting newly conquered and demarcated spaces were subjugated in a variety of ways, Ruling the Savage Periphery isolates continuities across regimes and locates the patterns of transmission that made frontier governmentality a world-spanning phenomenon.
Today, the supposedly failed states along the margins of the international system—states riven by terrorism and violence—are not dysfunctional anomalies. Rather, they work as imperial statecraft intended, harboring the outsiders whom stable states simultaneously encapsulate and exploit. “Civilization” continues to deny responsibility for border dwellers while keeping them close enough to work, buy goods across state lines, and justify national-security agendas. The present global order is thus the tragic legacy of a colonial design, sustaining frontier governmentality and its objectives for a new age.
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