This compilation of Dale Morgan's historical work on Indians in the Intermountain West focuses primarily on the Shoshone who lived near the Oregon and California trails.Three connected works by Morgan are included: First is his classic article on the history of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs. This is followed by a previously unpublished history of early relations among the Western Shoshoni, emigrants, and the government along the California Trail. The book concludes with an important set of government reports and correspondence from the National Archives concerning the Eastern Shoshone and their leader Washakie. Morgan heavily annotated these for serial publication in the Annals of Wyoming. He also wrote a previously unpublished history of early relations among the Western Shoshone, emigrants, and the government along the California Trail.Morgan biographer Richard L. Saunders introduces, edits, and further annotates this collection. His introduction includes an intellectual biography of Morgan that focuses on the place of the anthologized pieces in Morgan's corpus. Gregory E. Smoak, a leading historian of the Shoshone, contributes an ethnohistorical essay as additional context for Morgan's work.

In the first book to focus on relations between Indians and emigrants on the overland trails, Michael L. Tate shows that such encounters were far more often characterized by cooperation than by conflict. Having combed hundreds of unpublished sources and Indian oral traditions, Tate finds Indians and Anglo-Americans continuously trading goods and news with each other, and Indians providing various forms of assistance to overlanders. Tate admits that both sides normally followed their own best interests and ethical standards, which sometimes created distrust. But many acts of kindness by emigrants and by Indians can be attributed to simple human compassion. Not until the mid-1850s did Plains tribes begin to see their independence and cultural traditions threatened by the flood of white travelers. As buffalo herds dwindled and more Indians died from diseases brought by emigrants, violent clashes between wagon trains and Indians became more frequent, and the first Anglo-Indian wars erupted on the plains. Yet, even in the 1860s, Tate finds, friendly encounters were still the rule. Despite thousands of mutually beneficial exchanges between whites and Indians between 1840 and 1870, the image of Plains Indians as the overland pioneers’ worst enemies prevailed in American popular culture. In explaining the persistence of that stereotype, Tate seeks to dispel one of the West’s oldest cultural misunderstandings.

An influential Utah historian whose work shaped new approaches to the history of Mormonism and the American West.

Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples is the first book-length study of the writer’s evolving views regarding the aboriginal inhabitants of North America and the Southern Hemisphere, and his deeply conflicted representations of them in fiction, newspaper sketches, and speeches. Using a wide range of archival materials—including previously unexamined marginalia in books from Clemens’s personal library—Driscoll charts the development of the writer’s ethnocentric attitudes about Indians and savagery in relation to the various geographic and social milieus of communities he inhabited at key periods in his life, from antebellum Hannibal, Missouri, and the Sierra Nevada mining camps of the 1860s to the progressive urban enclave of Hartford’s Nook Farm. The book also examines the impact of Clemens’s 1895–96 world lecture tour, when he traveled to Australia and New Zealand and learned firsthand about the dispossession and mistreatment of native peoples under British colonial rule. This groundbreaking work of cultural studies offers fresh readings of canonical texts such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Roughing It, and Following the Equator, as well as a number of Twain’s shorter works.

Between 1841 and 1866, more than a half-million people followed trails to Oregon, California, and Utah in one of the largest mass migrations in American history. The Great Medicine Road, Part 4 collects the letters, diaries, and reminiscences of some of the emigrants who made this journey between 1856 and 1869, as a second generation of miners, farmers, town builders, and religious believers turned their adventurous eyes westward in search of new beginnings. Here, in their own words, are the experiences of young men hoping to make their fortunes in mining operations that had sprung up as the gold rush wore down, in California but also now in the silver mines of Nevada’s Comstock Lode and the recently discovered gold mines of Colorado’s Denver and Pike’s Peak regions. Here also are families and farmers looking for land in the fertile Willamette Valley of Oregon, or joining the Mormon community in Utah. And here are the stories of intrepid sojourners traveling with—or without—military escorts as the Civil War, conflicts with Indians, and the Mormon stand against the U.S. government altered the circumstances of westward traffic. These documents, with an introduction and editorial notes written by historian Michael L. Tate to provide context and commentary, comprise the fourth and final installment in a documentary history of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails. They give a living voice to the history of the American experience at a time of westward expansion and profound, unprecedented change.