Our American West, Volume 2 begins with America’s first colonizers, the prairie dogs, and how out on the ranges they were so hated by ranchers that they were almost made extinct. Conestoga Wagons were once called “prairie schooners” crossing America long before the famed Pony Express. The indomitable courage of Sarah Winnemucca, the “Paiute Princess” rivals that of a tall Swede named Snowshoe Thompson who skied the snowy winter passes of the Sierra Nevadas for over twenty years packing the mail and saving lives. Almost no one knows of Esther Hobart Morris, but Wyoming proudly claims her as its Mother of Women’s Suffrage.
In this exciting volume you will marvel at the transcontinental railroad race between the Union Pacific’s Chinese laborers and the predominantly Irish Central Pacific Railroad crews and about how a one-armed Civil War hero named John Wesley Powell was the first explorer to run the mighty Grand Canyon deep within its corridors of stone. Doctors were often called “sawbones” and not without good reason as they struggled to save their patients with little more than poultices and prayers. Tom Horn was a tall and handsome hired gun, but did he hang for a killing he did not even commit?
And how about the often ridiculed mules are they really smarter than horses? Billy the Kid was a natural born killer, however Clay Allison was every bit as deadly and you’ll hear some stories about the famed fast draw -was it a case of Myths but Mostly Misses? Few tales of our Native Americans are more moving that the Cherokee and their “Trail of Tears” and the great Chief Sitting Bull was one of the last of the America’s storied Native American “Horseback Fighters of the Plains” to surrender. The United States Army’s Buffalo Soldiers did more than prove their worth on the lawless frontier and The Ghost Dancers had nothing less than extermination on their minds. Mark Twain survived a perilous stagecoach ride to the West then went on to fame as did Frederick Remington, yet both returned to the East. Why? The infamous Bandit Queens were Belle Starr, a wild and wicked woman and Pearl Hart, who robbed the last stagecoach in the West and was sent to the dreaded Yuma Territorial Prison then disappeared forever, only to reappear on these pages of Our American West Volume 2.
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