110 photographs and illustrations in text.

Miners, loggers, railroad men, and others flooded into the American West after the discovery of gold in 1848, and entertainers seeking to fill the demand for distraction from the workers' daily toil soon followed. Actors, actresses and traveling troupes crisscrossed the American frontier, performing in tents, saloons, fancy theaters, and the open air. This exploration of the heyday of popular theater in the Old West chronicles its emergence and growth from 1850 to the early twentieth century. Here is the story of the men and women who provided myriad types of entertainment in the Old West, and brought excitement, laughter and tears to generations of pioneers.

Accompanying CD contains sound recordings of 39 tunes, by various performers.

True stories of nineteenth-century crooks, con artists, and quacks—including the man who “sold” the Brooklyn Bridge. Gunslingers and outlaws weren’t the only ones who made the West wild. The nineteenth century was the golden era of riverboat gamblers, crooked railroad contractors, and filthy-rich medical quacks. These crooks made a living deceiving people who took a stranger at face value and left their doors unlocked. Throw in some get-rich-quick schemes and a generous mixture of whiskey and there was never a shortage of suckers. Conman George Parker was able to stay in business for forty years by “selling” public structures such as Madison Square Garden and the Statue of Liberty. He even “sold” the Brooklyn Bridge as often as twice a week. For most, the Salted Gold Mine or the Magic Wallet cons were enough to satisfy their greed. However, the more ambitious grifters tried the Big Store, an illegal underground betting parlor like the one seen in the movie The Sting. With an honest-looking face and a lack of morals, these scammers played a big role in giving the frontier its lawless reputation—and this book tells their stories.

"Pioneering Americans of the nineteenth century did not merely rush for gold, lust for land, and thrust aside the West's original inhabitants. These mountain men, cowboys, homesteaders, and cavalry troopers played nearly as hard as they worked, exploiting to the hilt what little leisure they could steal from their labors. Nor did they only carouse-drink, gamble, and womanize-as the West's fiction might suggest. They were spectators at bull and bear fights in California; actors in amateur theatricals in Army garrisons; and participants in communal barn raisings and quilting bees on the prairie. This is a delightful look at a very neglected aspect of the story of westering Americans."-Richard H. Dillon, author of Meriwether Lewis, Fool's Gold, and The Legend of Grizzly Adams. "The men on Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition square-danced to fiddle music. Cowboys' leisure pursuits included singing, storytelling, dominoes, reading, and foot races. U.S. Army soldiers played the newfangled game of baseball and even enjoyed debating and attending concerts. Dary's irresistible narrative recreates card games on Mississippi steamboats, New Orleans balls, frontier campfires and cafe-theatres, Santa Fe saloons, and Wyoming bicycle clubs and mineral spas, and it charts the emergence of a middle class that came to disapprove of prostitution, gambling, drinking, bear-baiting, and buffalo-hunting. An engaging chronicle."-Publishers Weekly. "As David Dary proves in this pleasurable book, the Old West was not all trouble and toil. Much is to be learned here-from mountain men and Indians to cowboys and homesteaders-about how to have fun, no matter the circumstances."-Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. "This lively and good-humored narrative takes the reader on a journey to a time before pleasure ruled lives, a time when fun was where you found it and was what you did when you had time."-Dallas Morning News. "This delightful volume describes activities ranging from the simple and the homespun to the bawdy and elaborate."-Booklist. "A treasury of the colorful characters who spent their brief hour on that wild and woolly stage."-Kansas City Star.

The history of America is, at its core, the story of the American West. In this new volume from the Western Writers of America, readers are taken deep into the true stories that helped America form its identity, and the people that embodied its essence. James A. Crutchfield, a long-time WWA Secretary-Treasurer and seasoned historian, has assembled a remarkable cadre of contributors in The Way West. Included are winners of the Owen Wister Award, given for lifetime achievement in literature on the West: * David Dary explores the network of trails that lead explorers West * Bill Gulick recalls the Steamboat days of the Pacific Northwest * Leon Claire Metz goes deep into John Wesley Hardin's world * Robert M. Utley shows us the true faces of the Texas Rangers * Dale L. Walker takes us on a tour of the final resting places of forty of the West's most celebrated figures. The Way West covers many of the now obscure individuals and long-lost tales of our storied past and gives new insights into famous characters and events of this legendary era. So join the Western Writers of America on a journey back in time and lose yourself in the colorful history of the American West.

Prohibition was imposed by eager temperance movements organizers who sought to shape public behavior through alcoholic beverage control in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The success of reformers' efforts resulted in National Prohibition in America from 1920 to 1933, but it also resulted in a thriving illegal business in the manufacture and distribution of illegal liquor. The history of Prohibition and the resulting illegal drinking is frequently told through the lens of crime and violence in Chicago and other major East Coast cities. Often neglected are the effects of Prohibition on the Western part of the United States and how Westerners rose to the challenge of avoiding the consequences of illegal drinking. Illegal liquor was imported from abroad, made in stills using strange ingredients that were sometimes poisonous to the unlucky drinker. This history includes stories ranging from serious to quirky, and provides an entertaining account of how misguided efforts resulted in numerous unintended consequences.

In this earliest known day-by-day journal of a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas, Jack Bailey, a North Texas farmer, describes what it was like to live and work as a cowboy in the southern plains just after the Civil War. We follow Bailey as the drive moves northward into Kansas and then as his party returns to Texas through eastern Kansas, southwestern Missouri, northwestern Arkansas, and Indian Territory. For readers steeped in romantic cowboy legend, the journal contains surprises. Bailey’s time on the trail was hardly lonely. We travel with him as he encounters Indians, U.S. soldiers, Mexicans, freed slaves, and cowboys working other drives. He and other crew members—including women—battle hunger, thirst, illness, discomfort, and pain. Cowboys quarrel and play practical jokes on each other and, at night, sing songs around the campfire. David Dary’s thorough introduction and footnotes place the journal in historical context.

This book explores the role and influence of drink and drugs (primarily opium) in the Old West, which for this book is considered to be America west of the Mississippi from the California gold rush of the 1840s to the closing of the Western Frontier in roughly 1900. This period was the first time in American history that heavy drinking and drug abuse became a major social concern. Drinking was considered to be an accepted pursuit for men at the time. Smoking opium was considered to be deviant and associated with groups on the fringes of mainstream society, but opium use and addiction by women was commonplace. This book presents the background of both substances and how their use spread across the West, at first for medicinal purposes--but how overuse and abuse led to the Temperance Movement and eventually to National Prohibition. This book reports the historical reality of alcohol and opium use in the Old West without bias.