Ancient ecstasies -- Visualizing Lewis and Clark and the meaning of the West -- The eye and the heart in George Catlin's West -- Karl Bodmer's gift -- Alfred Jacob Miller's new Western American -- Jesus and animus beneath the Bitterroots -- An entire Heaven and an entire Earth : audubon on the Missouri -- Albert Bierstadt and the mountains of Mars -- Thomas Moran's Rocky Mountain romance -- Coming to terms with the Little Bighorn -- Altitude equals beatitude : William Henry Jackson and the Northern Rockies -- L.A. Huffman and the frontier disconnect -- Catching shadows in the northern West -- Through Indian eyes : the Crows and Richard Throssel -- Evelyn Cameron's time machine -- Carl Rungius and the son of wild folk -- Loving the West, hating the West, painting the West : the troubled times of Fra Dana -- Frederic Remington's Kiss of death -- Maynard and Montana -- Winold Reiss's beautiful Blackfeet -- Motion and poetry -- The bear in the mirror -- Emily Carr and the Great Mother -- The ripples beyond Ansel Adams -- In the end, what was Charlie Russell trying to tell us?

Publisher Description

2023 Caroline Bancroft History Prize from the Denver Public Library 2023 WHA W. Turrentine Jackson Award From the earliest days of non-Native settlement of Montana, when Chinese immigrants made up more than 10 percent of the territory's population, Chinese pioneers played a key role in the region's development. But this population, so crucial to Montana's history, remains underrepresented in historical accounts, and popular attention to the Chinese in Montana tends to focus on sensational elements--exoticizing Chinese Montanans and distancing their lived experiences from our modern understanding. The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky seeks to recover the stories of Montana's Chinese population in their own words and deepen understanding of Chinese experiences in Montana by using a global lens. Mark T. Johnson has mined several large collections of primary documents left by Chinese pioneers, translated into English here for the first time. These collections, spanning the 1880s through the 1950s, provide insight into the pressures the Chinese community faced--from family members back in China and from non-Chinese Montanans--as economic and cultural disturbances complicated acceptance of Chinese residents in the state. Through their own voices Johnson reveals the agency of Chinese Montanans in the history of the American West and China.

A fresh start in Montana From City Girl to Rancher’s Wife by Ami Weaver When Josie Callahan’s life in Los Angeles falls apart, she jumps at the chance to start over as a private chef in Montana. More used to stilettos and stainless steel appliances than cowboy boots and cozy kitchens, Josie is out of her element…especially with her sexy boss, Luke Ryder. Luke prefers horses to heartbreakers, but a delicious happily-ever-after might be on the menu! A Match Made in Montana by Joanna Sims When Officer Logan Wolf pulls over Josephine Brand for speeding, he’s struck by her irresistible blue eyes and sad smile. Even more striking is the news that she’s maid of honor at his best friend’s wedding! Josephine’s ex, Brice, broke her heart—yet she can’t deny her attraction to Logan. But just as her pain begins to fade, Brice shows up, wanting a second chance… Previously published as From City Girl to Rancher’s Wife and A Match Made in Montana

In Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America’s Fall from Grace, award-winner David Beers offers a powerful, personal vision of the rise and fall of the American middle class. Here is a dazzling literary chronicle of a family, a people, and a nation: the “blue sky tribe” of ever-optimistic middle-class Americans who believed in something called the American Dream, then woke up one day to discover it was gone. Blue Sky Dream is a book incredibly rich in ideas, in ways of seeing the recent past with stunning clarity. David Beers explores issues that define our times—downsizing, middle-class anxiety, the profound anger with government, the sense that something has gone awry with the United States—with such skill, personal immediacy, and compassion that readers will see their own histories in his prose. Blue Sky Dream can rightly be called a communal memoir, because in telling his family’s tale—growing tensions and disillusionment in their suburban paradise, a son rejecting his parents’ values, one sudden and inexplicable moment of violence—Beers tells the story of his people, the blue sky tribe “who imagined ourselves to be living the inevitable future, and are very surprised today to discover we were but a strange and aberrant moment that is now receding into history.”

Essays, poems, photographs, and letters explore the link between Buddhism and the Beats--with previously unpublished material from several beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Diane diPrima.

The Life of the Afterlife in the Big Sky State is a groundbreaking history of death in Montana. It offers a unique, reflective, and sensitive perspective on the evolution of customs and burial grounds. Beginning with Montana’s first known burial site, Ellen Baumler considers the archaeological records of early interments in rock ledges, under cairns, in trees, and on open-air scaffolds. Contact with Europeans at trading posts and missions brought new burial practices. Later, crude “boot hills” and pioneer graveyards evolved into orderly cemeteries. Planned cemeteries became the hallmark of civilization and the measure of an educated community. Baumler explores this history, yet untold about Montana. She traces the pathway from primitive beginnings to park-like, architecturally planned burial grounds where people could recreate, educate their children, and honor the dead. The Life of the Afterlife in the Big Sky State is not a comprehensive listing of the many hundreds of cemeteries across Montana. Rather it discusses cultural identity evidenced through burial practices, changing methods of interments and why those came about, and the evolution of cemeteries as the “last great necessity” in organized communities. Through examples and anecdotes, the book examines how we remember those who have passed on.

Black Elk’s Vision is a stunning picture book biography of the celebrated Lakota-Oglala medicine man from award-winning author and illustrator S. D. Nelson. Black Elk (1863–1950) was a Lakota-Oglala medicine man and a cousin of Crazy Horse. This biographical account follows him from childhood through adulthood, recounting the visions he had as a young boy and describing his involvement in the battles of Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee, as well as his journeys to New York City and Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Award-winning author and member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe S. D. Nelson tells the story of Black Elk through the voice of the medicine man, bringing to life what it was like to be Native American from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century. The Native people found their land overrun by the wasichus (White Man), the buffalo slaughtered for sport, and their people gathered onto reservations. Interspersing archival images with his own artwork, inspired by the ledger-art drawings of the 19th-century Lakota, Nelson conveys how Black Elk clung to his childhood vision, which planted the seeds to help his people—and all people—understand their place in the Circle of Life. Backmatter includes a Lakota description of the Circle of Life, a brief history of the Lakota and a timeline.

A gorgeous combination of photographs, original art, and descriptive text that celebrates the wild and seldom-visited canyonlands of the Texas Plains. Exploring an environment largely unknown to even native Texans, both writer and artist take the reader on an intimate and compelling visit to an unforgetably beautiful corner of Texas.