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Robert M. Utley

This award-winning history of the Sioux in the 19th century ranges from its forced migration to the reservation to the Wounded Knee Massacre.
 
 First published in 1963, Robert M. Utley’s classic study of the Sioux Nation was a landmark achievement in Native American historical research. The St. Louis Dispatch called it “by far the best treatment of the complex and controversial relationship between the Sioux and their conquerors yet presented and should be must reading for serious students of Western Americana.” Today, it remains one of the most thorough and accurate depictions of the tragic violence that broke out near Wounded Knee Creek on December 29th, 1890.
 
 In the preface to this second edition, western historian Robert M. Utley reflects on the importance of his work and changing perspectives on Native American history. Acknowledging the inaccuracy of his own title, he points out that “Wounded Knee did not represent the end of the Sioux tribes…It ended one era and open another in the lives of the Sioux people.”
 
Winner of the Buffalo Award

Yale University Press

The Lamar Series in Western History

The Last Days of the Sioux Nation: Second Edition

John R. Bockstoce

How the fur trade changed the North and created the modern Arctic

In the early twentieth century, northerners lived and trapped in one of the world’s harshest environments. At a time when government services and social support were minimal or nonexistent, they thrived on the fox fur trade, relying on their energy, training, discipline, and skills. John R. Bockstoce, a leading scholar of the Arctic fur trade who also served as a member of an Eskimo whaling crew, explores the twentieth-century history of the Western Arctic fur trade to the outbreak of World War II, covering an immense region from Chukotka, Russia, to Arctic Alaska and the Western Canadian Arctic. This period brought profound changes to Native peoples of the North. To show its enormous impact, the author draws on interviews with trappers and traders, oral and written archival accounts, research in newspapers and periodicals, and his own field notes from 1969 to the present.

White Fox and Icy Seas in the Western Arctic: The Fur Trade, Transportation, and Change in the Early Twentieth Century

Two famous 19th century outlaws from opposite sides of the world are brought to rollicking life in the acclaimed historian’s “marvelous dual biography” (Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior).
 
 The legendary exploits of Billy the Kid and Ned Kelly live on in the public imaginations of their respective countries, the United States and Australia. But the outlaws’ reputations are so mythologized, the truth of their lives has become obscure. In Wanted, Robert M. Utley reveals the true stories and parallel courses of the two notorious contemporaries who lived by the gun, were executed while still in their twenties, and remain compelling figures in the folklore of their homelands.

 Utley draws sharp portraits of both young men, offering insightful comparisons of their lives and legacies. Billy was a fun-loving sharpshooter who excelled at escape and lived on the run after indictment for his role in the Lincoln Country War. While Ned, raised in the bush by his Irish convict father, was driven by outrage against British colonial authority to steal cattle and sheep, kill three policemen, and rob banks for the benefit of impoverished Irish sympathizers. Recounting their exploits, differences, and shared fates, Utley illuminates the worlds in which they lived on opposite sides of the globe.
 
“Robert M. Utley displays the gifts that have made him a storied interpreter of the nineteenth-century west.”—T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The First Tycoon

Wanted: The Outlaw Lives of Billy the Kid & Ned Kelly

This “meticulous and finely researched” biography tracks the Apache raider’s life from infamous renegade to permanent prisoner of war (Publishers Weekly).
 
 Notorious for his ferocity in battle and uncanny ability to elude capture, the Apache fighter Geronimo became a legend in his own time and remains an iconic figure of the nineteenth century American West. In Geronimo, renowned historian Robert M. Utley digs beneath the myths and rumors to produce an authentic and thoroughly researched portrait of the man whose unique talents and human shortcomings swept him into the fierce storms of history.
 
 Utley draws on an array of newly available sources, including firsthand accounts and military reports, as well as his geographical expertise and deep knowledge of the conflicts between whites and Native Americans. This highly accurate and vivid narrative unfolds through the alternating perspectives of whites and Apaches, arriving at a more nuanced understanding of Geronimo’s character and motivation than ever before.
 
 What was it like to be an Apache fighter-in-training? Why was Geronimo feared by whites and Apaches alike? Why did he finally surrender after remaining free for so long? The answers to these and many other questions fill the pages of this authoritative volume.

Geronimo

Pekka Hämäläinen

A groundbreaking history of the rise and decline of the vast and imposing Native American empire. 
 
 In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history.
 
 This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches. It is a story that challenges the idea of indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new model for the history of colonial expansion, colonial frontiers, and Native-European relations in North America and elsewhere. Pekka Hämäläinen shows in vivid detail how the Comanches built their unique empire and resisted European colonization, and why they fell to defeat in 1875. With extensive knowledge and deep insight, the author brings into clear relief the Comanches’ remarkable impact on the trajectory of history.
 
2009 Winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History
 
“Cutting-edge revisionist western history…. Immensely informative, particularly about activities in the eighteenth century.”—Larry McMurtry, The New York Review of Books
 
“Exhilarating…a pleasure to read…. It is a nuanced account of the complex social, cultural, and biological interactions that the acquisition of the horse unleashed in North America, and a brilliant analysis of a Comanche social formation that dominated the Southern Plains.”—Richard White, author of The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815

The Comanche Empire

Steven Lubet

This account of the court case that followed the gunfight at the OK Corral “will interest Wild West buffs as well as readers interested in legal history” (Publishers Weekly).

The gunfight at the OK Corral lasted less than a minute—yet it became the basis for countless stories about the Wild West. At the time of the event, however, Wyatt Earp was not universally acclaimed as a hero. Among the people who knew him best in Tombstone, Arizona, many considered him a renegade and murderer.

This book tells the nearly unknown story of the prosecution of Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holiday following the famous gunfight. To the prosecutors, the Earps and Holiday were wanton killers. According to the defense, the Earps were steadfast heroes—willing to risk their lives on the mean streets of Tombstone for the sake of order.

The case against the Earps, with its dueling narratives of brutality and justification, played out themes of betrayal, revenge, and even adultery. Attorney Thomas Fitch, one of the era’s finest advocates, ultimately managed, against considerable odds, to save Earp from the gallows. But the case could easily have ended in a conviction—and Wyatt Earp would have been hanged or imprisoned instead of celebrated as an American icon.

“This trial has everything: a family feud, famous outlaws and lawmen, politics, sex, and the most famous shootout in frontier history … Lubet’s accessible and highly original book will set a standard for scholarship in a field laden with folklore.” —Allen Barra, author of Inventing Wyatt Earp