The Champion Buffalo Hunter is the fascinating memoir of one of the most legendary frontiersmen of the early West, “Yellowstone Vic” Smith. Born Victor Grant Smith in 1850, he lived a colorful life across the American frontier from the 1870s to 1890s. A classic frontiersman, he was a trapper, dispatch rider, scout, trick shot—and, yes, buffalo hunter extraordinaire. Discovered in Harvard University’s Houghton Library in 1990, this remarkable autobiography—which Smith wrote in the third person—is comparable to Andrew Garcia’s Tough Trip through Paradise, but, notes the editor, “without the melodrama.” Written in a matter-of-fact, often humorous style, it will engage and entertain all those interested in the lives and times of the men who wandered the West, following the great herds and settling only long enough for the snows to melt. This new edition includes a revised and updated foreword by Jeanette Prodgers based on new research into the life of Yellowstone Vic.

This study, first published in 2000, examines the cultural and ecological causes of the near-extinction of the bison.

Everyone knows the name Buffalo Bill, but few these days know what he did or, in some cases, didn't do. Was he a Pony Express rider? Did he serve Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn? Did he scalp countless Native Americans, or did he defend their rights? This, the first significant biography of Buffalo Bill Cody for younger readers in many years, explains it all. With copious archival illustrations and a handsome design, Presenting Buffalo Bill makes the great showman come alive for new generations. Extensive back matter, bibliography, and source notes complete the package. This title has Common Core connections.

Based on the memoirs and correspondence of Luther Sage "Yellowstone" Kelly (1849-1928), this first full-length biography offers a comprehensive look at a remarkable man who knew the frontier of the American West and recorded his impressions of that time and place with a fluid, literary pen.

The West has figured in the American imagination under many guises: as the last best place on earth, a refuge, an escape, a land of opportunity, but also as a place of conquest and failure. Where Lewis and Clark saw great possibilities, Native cultures found disappointment and loss. This collection presents the diverse and often contradictory accounts that make up the mosaic of the nineteenth-century American West. From Thomas Hart Benton?s famous speech in the Senate when he argued that non-white civilizations must fall before the western expansion of white Americans to Black Elk?s story of a way of life lost on the frozen ground at Wounded Knee, Gary Noy offers a representative sampling of the many Wests that historians have strug-gled to define for over a century. Distant Horizon chronicles the dusty world of the cowboy, the hard-scrabble existence of the farmer and the settler, and the miner?s vision of golden glory. It examines the independent nature of the explorer and mountain man and the sometimes heroic, sometimes cruel existence of the soldier. We hear the voices of those outside the mainstream of power?women and Westerners of color?and explore the most tragic element of Western history: the confinement, subjugation, and extermination of Native Americans. No other single volume provides as many readings on as many topics in the history of the American West.

First published in 1957, this is the complete, fascinated biography of "Doc" William Frank Carver, a legend of the American West. Even the expansive sub-title shows that there is no limit to the talents of Doc Carver—“Plainsman, Trapper, Buffalo Hunter, Medicine Chief Of The Santee Sioux, World's Champion Marksman, And Originator Of The American Wild West Show.” Doc’s life began in the era of American pioneering to the West. As a youth he lived with the Santee Sioux, from the plains of Illinois and the forests of Minnesota he graduated to the beautiful prairies of Nebraska where he became supreme as a horseback-riding buffalo hunter, and came to count among his close friends the mountain men and plainsmen of whom James B. Hickok, John Y. Nelson, Texas Jack, and the boastful “Buffalo Bill,” were but a few. To California, at thirty-five years of age, was Carver’s next move. Here he discovered in his reading of sporting magazines that men were making fortunes by shooting—men who were not good shots! His innate confidence assured him that he was the best shot in the world, and he began the work of proving to the world that he was not only the best marksman, but that he was to become one of the world’s outstanding showmen.