A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) is a work of travel literature by British explorer Isabella Bird. Adventurous from a young age, Bird gained a reputation as a writer and photographer interested in nature and the stories and cultures of people around the world. A bestselling author and the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographical Society, Bird is recognized today as a pioneering woman whose contributions to travel writing, exploration,...

Documents and personal narratives record the experiences of Native Americans during the nineteenth century.

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable...

A hilarious spoof of every western film cliche in which a black man is appointed sheriff of a frontier town.

With its dozens of outlying islands and the native Conchs' historically low regard for the law, Key West is a smuggler's paradise. All that's needed are the captains to run the contraband. Breeze Albury is one of the best fishing captains on the Rock, and he's in no mood to become the Machine's delivery boy. So the Machine sets out to persuade him. It starts out by taking away Albury's livelihood. Then it robs him of his freedom. But when the Machine...

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to a university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life. As the years pass, Stoner encounters a series of disappointments: marriage into a “proper” family estranges him from his parents; his career is stymied; his wife and daughter turn coldly away from him; a transforming experience...

In 1892, a legendary Army captain reluctantly agrees to escort a Cheyenne chief and his family through dangerous territory.

"Growing up on their hardscrabble farm in rural Kentucky, fifteen-year-old Albertina "Bertie" Winslow has learned a lot from her mama, Polly. She knows how to lance a boil, make a pie crust, butcher a pig, and tend to every chore that needs doing. What she doesn't know, but is forced to reckon with all too soon, is how to look after children as a mother should ...When Polly succumbs to a long illness, Bertie takes on responsibility for her four younger...

"The year is 1876. Warring Indian tribes still populate America's western territories even as lawless gold-rush towns begin to mark the landscape. In much of the country, it is still illegal to espouse evolution. Against this backdrop, two monomaniacal paleontologists pillage the Wild West, hunting for dinosaur fossils while surveilling, deceiving, and sabotaging each other in a rivalry that will come to be known as the Bone Wars. Into this treacherous...