Joseph Reddeford Walker looms large in the lore of the early West. From the Missouri to the San Joaquin, from the Gila to the Yellowstone, Walker spent more than thirty years—from the 1830s to the Civil War—trapping beaver in the Rockies, bartering with the Crow, Ute, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and Shoshone Indians, droving cattle and horses, and guiding emigrants and explorers. Walker was associated with Captain Bonneville in the fur trade from 1832 to 1835, but we have only an incomplete account these years in Washington Irving’s, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville and Zenas Leonards, Narrative. But the twist of fate that threw Daniel Ellis Conner into Walker’s party, en route from Colorado to explore Arizona in 1861, affords us several hundred manuscript pages, Conner’s four-year travel diary, relating his hair-raising adventures with this great mountain man. Joseph Reddeford Walker and the Arizona Adventure offers a superb chapter in the history of the West. Included are tales of the early Apache wars in New Mexico and Arizona; “The Betrayal of Mangas Coloradas,” with Conner’s eyewitness account of the Apache chief’s death; the emigrant trains to California; early settlement; mining operations, in “The Perils of Prospecting,” and countless episodes of action and violence that make fictional accounts pale in comparison.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History A dramatic, riveting, and “fresh look at a region typically obscured in accounts of the Civil War. American history buffs will relish this entertaining and eye-opening portrait” (Publishers Weekly). Megan Kate Nelson “expands our understanding of how the Civil War affected Indigenous peoples and helped to shape the nation” (Library Journal, starred review), reframing the era as one of national conflict—involving not just the North and South, but also the West. Against the backdrop of this larger series of battles, Nelson introduces nine individuals: John R. Baylor, a Texas legislator who established the Confederate Territory of Arizona; Louisa Hawkins Canby, a Union Army wife who nursed Confederate soldiers back to health in Santa Fe; James Carleton, a professional soldier who engineered campaigns against Navajos and Apaches; Kit Carson, a famous frontiersman who led a regiment of volunteers against the Texans, Navajos, Kiowas, and Comanches; Juanita, a Navajo weaver who resisted Union campaigns against her people; Bill Davidson, a soldier who fought in all of the Confederacy’s major battles in New Mexico; Alonzo Ickis, an Iowa-born gold miner who fought on the side of the Union; John Clark, a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s who embraced the Republican vision for the West as New Mexico’s surveyor-general; and Mangas Coloradas, a revered Chiricahua Apache chief who worked to expand Apache territory in Arizona. As we learn how these nine charismatic individuals fought for self-determination and control of the region, we also see the importance of individual actions in the midst of a larger military conflict. Based on letters and diaries, military records and oral histories, and photographs and maps from the time, “this history of invasions, battles, and forced migration shapes the United States to this day—and has never been told so well” (Pulitzer Prize–winning author T.J. Stiles).

A masterful reconstruction of one of the worst Indian massacres in American history In April 1871, a group of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono O?odham Indians surrounded an Apache village at dawn and murdered nearly 150 men, women, and children in their sleep. In the past century the attack, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, has largely faded from memory. Now, drawing on oral histories, contemporary newspaper reports, and the participants? own accounts, prize-winning author Karl Jacoby brings this perplexing incident and tumultuous era to life to paint a sweeping panorama of the American Southwest?a world far more complex, diverse, and morally ambiguous than the traditional portrayals of the Old West.

My Arizona Adventures is the true first-person account of an authentic American pioneer. When Tom Sanders came to Arizonas central highlands there was nothing there; there were no roads, no towns, no law, and no protection from marauding Indians. There was nothing there but opportunities for the strong, resolute and lucky. The year was 1863, Arizona had just become a separate Territory and its vast central interior was the last unknown area of the United States. That changed when a party of adventurers led by the legendary Joseph R. Walker found gold at the headwaters of the Hassayampa River and a new gold rush was underway. One of the early arrivals was young Tom Sanders who turned 18 shortly after his arrival at the new diggings. In the next six decades Tom was a miner, farmer, freighter and rancher while Arizona evolved from wilderness territory to 48th state. Tom was a gifted storyteller. His descriptions of the difficulties and challenges of freighting over the primitive roads between the isolated communities of Arizona Territory are understated but vivid and add much to our understanding of the frontier economy.

His wife dead, Elisa Green Pennington gathered up his brood of twelve young children in 1857 and left Texas for California, the promised land. The Penningtons could not have imagined what the untamed frontier had in store for them. After a difficult trek across West Texas and New Mexico, they were forced by sicknesses and circumstances to settle in the newly claimed Gadsden Purchase - present-day southern Arizona - where members of the clan and their descendants would remain into Arizona's statehood years. At the heart of this saga is Larcena Pennington Page Scott, who is witness as her loved ones are killed and her family's livelihood and property stolen. Larcena lived well into the twentieth century to tell the story of her captivity by Apaches and her miraculous escape from the captors, of outlawry and murder along the Mexican border, of disease, hunger, and isolation, and of the unceasing depredations by hostile Apaches during the 1860s and '70s. Using family letters, papers, and primary documents from all over the Southwest, Virginia Culin Roberts traces the lives of Larcena and her family. Roberts presents a real-life story of the rigors of surviving in a hostile and unforgiving land, transcending family history to provide a framework for telling the tale of the western frontier in the bloody Civil War and antebellum years.

The Civil War in 1861 found Southerners a minority throughout the West. Early efforts to create military forces were quickly suppressed. Many returned to the South to fight while others remained where they were, forming a potentially disloyal population. Underground movements existed throughout the war in Colorado, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and even Idaho. Repeatedly betrayed and overwhelmed by Union forces and without communications with the South, these groups were ineffective. In southern New Mexico, Southerners, who were the majority, aligned themselves with the Confederacy. Four small companies of irregulars, one Hispanic, fought (effectively) as part of the abortive Confederate invasion force of 1861-2. The most famous of these, the "Brigands," were close in function to a modern special forces unit. In 1862 the Brigands were sent into Colorado to join up with a secret army of 600-1,000 men massing there, but were betrayed. Returning to Texas, the Brigands and the other irregulars were used for special operations in the West throughout the War; they also fought in the Louisiana-Arkansas campaigns of 1863-4.

The first book in history that documents Waltz from birth to the grave. This landmark text offers historical proof, such as ship manifests and German translations of his infamous directions to the mine, and all major speculations that have occurred in the hundreds of books published in the 111 years following Waltz's death.