Fifteen-year-old Emil finds both adventure and tragedy in the rough-and-tumble Wisconsin wilderness when he goes there to sell harness in 1871.

Inspired by years of talking with farmers, foragers, loggers, tribal activists, seed savers, fishers, railroaders, and nature lovers of all stripes, Dennis Boyer has created in Listen to the Land a fascinating communal conversation that invites readers to ponder their own roles in grassroots environmentalism. The nearly fifty voices that Boyer recreates here cross genders, generations, and geography. They include an Ojibwe leader contemplating nuclear waste, a houseboat dweller, a woman sharing her skills in gathering edible plants, a caboose-tender, a Milwaukeean fighting urban blight—even a recluse who shoots out streetlights. Each of the extraordinarily varied perspectives that Boyer recreates here considers the question, How do I interact with the Earth? Each has something important to say that expands our understanding of conservation and environmentalism. Listen to the Land encourages you to read a conversation or two and then go outside and start one of your own.

Forests have always been more than just their trees. The forests in Michigan (and similar forests in other Great Lakes states such as Wisconsin and Minnesota) played a role in the American cultural imagination from the beginnings of European settlement in the early nineteenth century to the present. Our relationships with those forests have been shaped by the cultural attitudes of the times, and people have invested in them both moral and spiritual meanings. Author John Knott draws upon such works as Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory and Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests: The Shadow of Civilization in exploring ways in which our relationships with forests have been shaped, using Michigan---its history of settlement, popular literature, and forest management controversies---as an exemplary case. Knott looks at such well-known figures as William Bradford, James Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Teddy Roosevelt; Ojibwa conceptions of the forest and natural world (including how Longfellow mythologized them); early explorer accounts; and contemporary literature set in the Upper Peninsula, including Jim Harrison's True North and Philip Caputo's Indian Country. Two competing metaphors evolved over time, Knott shows: the forest as howling wilderness, impeding the progress of civilization and in need of subjugation, and the forest as temple or cathedral, worthy of reverence and protection. Imagining the Forest shows the origin and development of both.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you a collection of the greatest western novels by Arthur Murray Chisholm: "The Boss of Wind River" - After his father's demise, Joe Kent returns home to take charge of the family's lumber company. Being inexperienced and facing a strong adversary in the form of a wily railroad owner, Kent will have to overturn his misfortunes into opportunities. Will he succeed? "The Land of Strong Men" - Casey and Clyde meet during a train robbery. Will their love succeed in the midst of all the chaos around them? "Desert Conquest or, Precious Waters" "Six Rounds" "Fur Pirates" "The Come-On" "Easy Money" "Below the Jam" "A Thousand a Plate" Arthur Murray Chisholm (1871-1960), also known as Bob Chisholm later in life, was a Canadian author of Western fiction. He also served as government agent, coroner, police magistrate, and Justice of the Peace in British Columbia.

The biography of Theodore Davis, a rich American robber baron who, in the early 20th century discovered 18 tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

"'The process of transfer to private ownership of government land or government-supervised Indian land was the woof thread on the loom of the frontier,' the author writes in his preface. 'This thread was continually interlaced with hard experiences in the struggle for existence, thus weaving the fabric of the social and economic history of the American frontier. My aim in this book is to trace this thread from government ownership of the land into private hands.' Although Thomas Jefferson reckoned that the march of population from the Appalachians to the Pacific would take one hundred generations, by 1935 the western wilderness, created by law in the 1780s as the 'unreserved and unappropriated public domain,' had all but vanished. It is the human side of this process of land distribution that Professor Dick examines--'how the land-hungry pioneer interpreted the land laws, or ignored them; his success in "handing up laws" to Congress by frontier usage when existing statutes were inadequate for his needs; his custom of illegally exploiting the natural resources; and the final end of exploitation and the coming of a policy of conservation.' After a brief discussion of colonial land policies and the formation of the public domain in the post-Revolutionary period, the author describes the adoption of the surveying system, the actual work of the surveyors, and how the land was distributed to settlers. There follow chapters on the squatter; the use of land by lumbering interests; the struggle for pre-emption; the campaign of the West for free land and the passage of the Homestead Act; the problems which accompanied the acquisition of land from foreign governments; the occupation and exploitation of the mineral lands; the occupation and use of the grasslands with a discussion of the range wars; land given for internal improvements such as railroads; the openings of Indian reservations with their land rushes or drawings; the final occupancy of the dry land for use by dry-land farming or irrigation; and finally the coming of conservation and the establishment of the permanent public domain in the form of national forests and grazing land. Professor Dick's work goes beyond present books on land in the realm of human interest, for it deals with the people themselves, not with acts of Congress or legal decisions. It also goes deeper than previously published works into such areas as the development of claim clubs, squatting, and the holding of public land by individuals for extended use or speculation while waiting to sell at an advance over the government price."--Dust jacket.