Early Icons and Landmarks As western migration came to the Colorado frontier, forts were established to protect the settlers. These forts were intertwined with the lives of the frontiersmen. Scout Thomas Tate Tobin oversaw the workers who built the adobe fortress known as Fort Garland. Here, Tobin delivered the heads of the murderous Espinosas gang to Colonel Sam Tappan. Fort Sedgwick, originally known as Camp Rankin, was attacked by the Cheyenne Dog soldiers, including George Bent. Fort Lyon, an expanded fortress of William Bent's third fort, became the staging point for Colonel John M. Chivington's march to Sand Creek where peaceful Cheyenne were murdered. Later, Christopher "Kit" Carson died in the fort's chapel. Legendary Jim Beckwourth was associated with both Fort Vasquez and Fort Pueblo. Author Linda Wommack revisits the glory and the mistakes of the frontiersmen who defined Colorado and the forts that dotted the wild landscape.

Early Icons and Landmarks As western migration came to the Colorado frontier, forts were established to protect the settlers. These forts were intertwined with the lives of the frontiersmen. Scout Thomas Tate Tobin oversaw the workers who built the adobe fortress known as Fort Garland. Here, Tobin delivered the heads of the murderous Espinosas gang to Colonel Sam Tappan. Fort Sedgwick, originally known as Camp Rankin, was attacked by the Cheyenne Dog soldiers, including George Bent. Fort Lyon, an expanded fortress of William Bent's third fort, became the staging point for Colonel John M. Chivington's march to Sand Creek where peaceful Cheyenne were murdered. Later, Christopher "Kit" Carson died in the fort's chapel. Legendary Jim Beckwourth was associated with both Fort Vasquez and Fort Pueblo. Author Linda Wommack revisits the glory and the mistakes of the frontiersmen who defined Colorado and the forts that dotted the wild landscape.

Throughout the 1800s, explorers braved brutal weather and hostile enemies, trekking through the towering mountains and fertile valleys on the ragged edge of civilization. These early pioneers built stockades, trading posts, military camps and miniature citadels that would shape the state of Colorado for generations to come. As the settlers struggled to survive desperate times, economic depressions and bloody wars, some of these historic outposts would become Colorado's cities, schools, hospitals and museums, while others would sink back into the mud from which they came. Join author Jolie Anderson Gallagher as she chronicles the stories of the forts and the early explorers, fur trappers, soldiers and wives who constructed and occupied them.

Tells of the building of Bent's Fort, a trading post along the Santa Fe trail, and describes work there, the wagon trains, Indians who traded there, and life at the fort in summer and winter.

"Most of [Wootton's] life was spent in southeastern Colorado and northeastern New Mexico and spanned the years during which he saw the changes from an almost primitive to a fairly settled status [the 1830s through the 1890s]."--Publisher's preface, p. v.

On a September day in 1877, hundreds of Sioux and soldiers at Camp Robinson crowded around a fatally injured Lakota leader. A young doctor forced his way through the crowd, only to see the victim fading before him. It was the famed Crazy Horse. From intense moments like this to encounters with such legendary western figures as Calamity Jane and Red Cloud, Valentine Trant O'Connell McGillycuddy's life (1849–1939) encapsulated key events in American history that changed the lives of Native people forever. In Valentine T. McGillycuddy: Army Surgeon, Agent to the Sioux, the first biography of the man in seventy years, award-winning author Candy Moulton explores McGillycuddy's fascinating experiences on the northern plains as topographer, cartographer, physician, and Indian agent. Drawing on family papers, interviews, government documents, and a host of other sources, Moulton presents a colorful character—a thin, blue-eyed, cultured physician who could outdrink trail-hardened soldiers. In fresh, vivid prose, she traces McGillycuddy's work mapping out the U.S.-Canadian border; treating the wounded from the battles of the Rosebud, the Little Bighorn, and Slim Buttes; tending to Crazy Horse during his final hours; and serving as agent to the Sioux at Pine Ridge, where he clashed with Chief Red Cloud over the government's assimilation policies. Along the way, Moulton weaves in the perspective of McGillycuddy's devoted first wife, Fanny, who followed her husband west and wrote of the realities of camp life. McGillycuddy's doctoring of Crazy Horse marked only one point of his interaction with American Indians. But those relationships were also just one aspect of his life in the West, which extended well into the twentieth century. Enhanced by more than 20 photographs, this long-overdue biography offers general readers and historians an engaging adventure story as well as insight into a period of tumultuous change.