Early Icons and Landmarks As western migration came to the Colorado frontier, forts were established to protect the settlers. These forts were intertwined with the lives of the frontiersmen. Scout Thomas Tate Tobin oversaw the workers who built the adobe fortress known as Fort Garland. Here, Tobin delivered the heads of the murderous Espinosas gang to Colonel Sam Tappan. Fort Sedgwick, originally known as Camp Rankin, was attacked by the Cheyenne Dog soldiers, including George Bent. Fort Lyon, an expanded fortress of William Bent's third fort, became the staging point for Colonel John M. Chivington's march to Sand Creek where peaceful Cheyenne were murdered. Later, Christopher "Kit" Carson died in the fort's chapel. Legendary Jim Beckwourth was associated with both Fort Vasquez and Fort Pueblo. Author Linda Wommack revisits the glory and the mistakes of the frontiersmen who defined Colorado and the forts that dotted the wild landscape.

Jolie Anderson's collection of wild west tales focuses on the early frontier history of Colorado's plains and includes a look at some of the state's early pioneers like the "59ers" who promoted the state through travel guides and newspapers, exaggerating tales of gold discovery and even providing inaccurate maps to promote settlement in the plains; the perils of living and traveling the major gold routes the town of Julesburg relocated four times in a decade; feuds; Indian fights; outlaws, and even early rodeo history. These stories and events shaped the Colorado territory and are a rich glimpse into the early history of the state.

Thirteen essays examine the roles African-Americans played in the settling of the American West, discussing the slaves of Mormons and California gold miners; African-American army men, cowboys, and newspaper founders; and others on the frontier. Also includes a bibliographic essay.

Frontiersmen in Blue is a comprehensive history of the achievements and failures of the United States Regular and Volunteer Armies that confronted the Indian tribes of the West in the two decades between the Mexican War and the close of the Civil War. Between 1848 and 1865 the men in blue fought nearly all of the western tribes. Robert Utley describes many of these skirmishes in consummate detail, including descriptions of garrison life that was sometimes agonizingly isolated, sometimes caught in the lightning moments of desperate battle.

Pious and scholarly, the Franciscan friars Pedro Font, Juan Crespí, and Francisco Garcés may at first seem improbable heroes. Beginning in Spain, their adventures encompassed the remote Sierra Gorda highlands of Mexico, the deserts of the American Southwest, and coastal California. Each man’s journey played an important role in Spain’s eighteenth-century conquest of the Pacific coast, but today their names and deeds are little known. Drawing on the diaries and correspondence of Font, Crespí, and Garcés, as well as his own exhaustive field research, Robert A. Kittle has woven a seamless narrative detailing the friars’ striking accomplishments. Starting with a harrowing transatlantic voyage, all three traveled through uncharted lands and found themselves beset by raiding Indians, marauding bears, starvation, and scurvy. Along the way, they made invaluable notes on indigenous peoples, flora and fauna, and prominent eighteenth-century European colonial figures. Font, the least celebrated of the three, recorded the daily events of the 1775–76 colonizing expedition of Juan Bautista de Anza while serving as its chaplain. Font’s legacy includes some of the earliest accurate maps of California between San Diego Bay and San Francisco Bay. Garcés, an itinerant missionary, developed close relationships with Indians in Sonora and California. He learned their languages and lived and traveled with them, usually as the only white man, and brokered dozens of peace agreements before he was killed in a Yuma uprising. Crespí, who traveled up the California coast with Father Junípero Serra, kept meticulous journals of an expedition to reconnoiter the San Francisco Bay area, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, and the northern reaches of California’s central valley. This enthralling narrative elevates these Spanish friars to their rightful place in the chronicle of American exploration. It brings their exploits out of the shadow of the American Revolution and Lewis & Clark expedition while also illuminating encounters between European explorers and missionaries and the American Indians who had occupied the Pacific coast for millennia.

This eBook edition of "The Last American Frontier (Complete Edition)" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. The exploration, settlement, exploitation, and conflicts of the "American Old West" form a unique tapestry of events, which has been celebrated by Americans and foreigners alike—in art, music, dance, novels, magazines, short stories, poetry, theater, video games, movies, radio, television, song, and oral tradition. Many historians of the American West have written about the mythic West; the west of western literature, art and of people's shared memories. But Frederic Paxson's book takes us through the era when the American frontier was undergoing a massive transformation and when the decades old struggles of the Native Americans were finally beginning to make a dent in the old white American history... Frederic Logan Paxson was a Pulitzer Prize winning American historian and an authority on the American frontier.