Squatters in Paradise is the long-awaited cri-de-coeur of Yellowstone employees - savages - and gleefully exposes the dark and ticklish underbelly of seasonal work in America's first national park. Written with unapologetic irreverence, the author also manages to convey the very real affection that park employees feel for their natural environs and the community which forms each season within the borders of this unique and magical place. A must-read for those who have worked in Yellowstone National Park (or anyone who has harbored the idea of taking a break from the real world for a while).

"George Black rediscovers the history and lore of one of the planet's most magnificent landscapes. Read Empire of Shadows, and you'll never think of our first—in many ways our greatest—national park in the same way again." —Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder Empire of Shadows is the epic story of the conquest of Yellowstone, a landscape uninhabited, inaccessible and shrouded in myth in the aftermath of the Civil War. In a radical reinterpretation of the nineteenth century West, George Black casts Yellowstone's creation as the culmination of three interwoven strands of history - the passion for exploration, the violence of the Indian Wars and the "civilizing" of the frontier - and charts its course through the lives of those who sought to lay bare its mysteries: Lt. Gustavus Cheyney Doane, a gifted but tormented cavalryman known as "the man who invented Wonderland"; the ambitious former vigilante leader Nathaniel Langford; scientist Ferdinand Hayden, who brought photographer William Henry Jackson and painter Thomas Moran to Yellowstone; and Gen. Phil Sheridan, Civil War hero and architect of the Indian Wars, who finally succeeded in having the new National Park placed under the protection of the US Cavalry. George Black1s Empire of Shadows is a groundbreaking historical account of the origins of America1s majestic national landmark.

First edition published in 1941 under title : Summarized data on Federal reclamation projects.

Contains monthly column of the Sequoya League.