His dream was to build magnificent steamboats to ply the rivers of the American frontier. But when Jean Talon began his journey westward, he stumbled upon a deadly conspiracy involving a young woman’s search to find her missing brother, and a ruthless band of renegades. Led by the brazen Baron Torville, this makeshift army of opportunists is plotting a violent takeover of the Louisiana Territory. Jean swears to find a way to stop this daring plan. If he doesn’t, it will not only put an end to all his dreams; it will change the course of history—and destroy the promise of the American frontier.

This text is a magisterial account of John Wesley Powell, the great American explorer and environmental pioneer. It tells the true story of undaunted courage in the American West.

The Green River runs wild, free and vigourous from southern Wyoming to northeastern Utah. Edward Abbey wrote in these pages in 1975 that Anne Zwinger's account of the Green River and its subtle forms of life and nonlife may be taken as authoritative. 'Run, River, Run,' should serve as a standard reference work on this part of the American West for many years to come." —New York Times Book Review

A fantastic Western romp by one of America's finest writers.

The magic and majesty of America’s greatest western fly-fishing rivers. Flywater brings us to the iconic creeks, springs, freestone rivers, and tailwaters that make the American West the world’s premier destination for fly fishing. Grant McClintock’s first book struck a chord with fishermen, and fifteen years later he takes the reader back to these fabulous places—from the storied Henry’s Fork to the Yellowstone to the Thompson River in British Columbia. With extraordinary new photography and wisdom, McClintock revisits these home waters and discovers countless others as well. Flywater is a gallery of moments and places. From Idaho and Montana to Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, McClintock’s rich photography of trout and steelhead waters surrounded by beautiful Western landscapes creates a compelling journey that the reader, whether fisherman or non-fisherman, will thoroughly enjoy. For the serious fly fisherman, this is an album of shared experiences. For the uninitiated, it is an artfully crafted guidebook to an exotic new world that really does exist on the streams and rivers of the American West.

A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, The Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Sally Hacker Prize for the History of Technology “A panoramic vision of cultural change” —The New York Times Through the story of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the author of Orwell's Roses explores what it was about California in the late 19th-century that enabled it to become such a center of technological and cultural innovation The world as we know it today began in California in the late 1800s, and Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybridge—who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically—becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post–Civil War California led directly to the two industries—Hollywood and Silicon Valley—that have most powerfully defined contemporary society.

The American West, blessed with an abundance of earth and sky but cursed with a scarcity of life's most fundamental need, has long dreamed of harnessing all its rivers to produce unlimited wealth and power. In Rivers of Empire, award-winning historian Donald Worster tells the story of this dream and its outcome. He shows how, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Mormons were the first attempting to make that dream a reality, damming and diverting rivers to irrigate their land. He follows this intriguing history through the 1930s, when the federal government built hundreds of dams on every major western river, thereby laying the foundation for the cities and farms, money and power of today's West. Yet while these cities have become paradigms of modern American urban centers, and the farms successful high-tech enterprises, Worster reminds us that the costs have been extremely high. Along with the wealth has come massive ecological damage, a redistribution of power to bureaucratic and economic elites, and a class conflict still on the upswing. As a result, the future of this "hydraulic West" is increasingly uncertain, as water continues to be a scarce resource, inadequate to the demand, and declining in quality.