Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

"The story of a Civil War soldier finding his humanity in the face of horrible savagery. Emerging from the Civil War a shamed and broken man, Stephen Latch turns to a life of thievery and murder. Still hoping to uphold the values of the Confederacy, Latch sets his sights on the wealth of resources pouring westward from the northern United States, putting together a band of ruthless misfits to help him stake his claim of the riches of the caravans....

Includes "writings of more than a hundred women" who experienced the "trip across the continent." Revised edition includes material on "young girls ... between eight and sixteen for whom the monumental crossing was a lark."

A legend is born...and the saga begins. He'd come to the Rockies as a runaway twelve-year-old and grown into a living legend. He could out fight, out drink, out cuss, out dance, out ride and out lie any man alive. They called him Preacher...All Preacher has on his mind is a hankering for some companionship at the annual mountain man rendezvous in Popo Agie. But his plans change when he rides down into Fort Hall and finds he's the only man knowledgeable...

While traveling west with her family in 1850, a young girl makes a patchwork quilt chronicling the experiences of the journey and reserves a special patch for her pet hen Josefina.

Virginia City! Boom town on the wild Nevada frontier! Atop the silver-rich mountains of the Comstock Lode were the desperate dreamers, thousands of men and women lured by the glittering promise of limitless wealth. But as the bountiful mother lode is mined, the nation itself is being torn apart by a burning confrontation that threatens to destroy America for ever.

In 1848, while on a wagon train headed for Oregon, fourteen-year-old Francis Tucket is kidnapped by Pawnee Indians and then falls in with a one-armed trapper who teaches him how to live in the wild.

Douglas Deeds, a fifteen-year-old orphan, keeps a journal of his travels by wagon train as a member of the ill-fated Donner Party, which became stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846-47.

THE OLD TRAILS WEST is history with the flavor of fiction. It is the story of the great legendary routes that bound a wild land into a nation. The Oregon Trail, El Camino Real, the Butterfield Overland Mail, The Santa Fe Trail--these are names that conjure up the romance of the past.. This book recounts the true stories behind the trails: what impelled their exploration, determined their paths, how they contributed to the settling of the West, and...

"The story of the frontier express lines that linked the nation together"--Jacket subtitle.

Drawing on fresh archeological evidence, recent research on topics ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and diaries made public by descendants a century-and-a-half after the tragedy, Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner party--ninety pioneers who became stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846-47-- and their unimaginable ordeal