Collected here for the first time ever are the surviving eyewitness accounts of the Bozeman's Trail's civilian emigrants: twenty-four diaries written during the journey and nine reminiscences prepared afterward. These accounts describe life on the West's last great emigrant trail, the shortcut from the Platte River Road to the Montana goldfields, from 1863 until 1866, when the route was closed by "Red Cloud's War." Ample introductions, extensive annotation, historical illustrations, and detailed maps enrich this oversized, two-volume compendium.

Torah as a guide to personal growth Following the framework of the ancient tradition of weekly Torah reading, Shefa Gold shows us how to find blessing, challenge and the opportunity for spiritual transformation in each portion of Torah. An inspiring guide to exploring the landscape of Scripture... and recognizing that landscape as the story of your life. Torah Journeys: The Inner Path to the Promised Land promises to turn the year-long cycle of Torah reading into a journey of personal spiritual growth. The first book by Rabbi Shefa Gold, the popular teacher of chant and meditation, Torah Journeys is designed to be meaningful for those at any spiritual level. Shefa Gold is renowned in Jewish Renewal circles and beyond for her teachings, particularly in the realms of chanting, meditation, and connecting to the sacred. She received rabbinical ordinations from both the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Salomi. In Torah Journeys, Rabbi Gold reveals a blessing and a challenge hidden in each weekly Torah portion, based on her principle that the Torah is happening now, and that its stories - from the Creation in Genesis through the death of Moses at the end of Deuteronomy - are about each individual's life journey. Drawing from her spiritual search as an adept in an array of practices, Rabbi Gold offers transformative practices for each week, ranging from meditation to visualization to chant. Torah Journeys is the fruit of the religious journey of an engaging teacher with an impressive grasp of the texts and liturgy. Having experienced other traditions inspired Rabbi Gold to search out similar tools in Judaism to expand consciousness, become fully human and know God Rabbi Gold shares with us her insightful approach to Bible study and personal growth. The result is poetry for the soul. Torah Journeys is a book that is not merely about Jewish Renewal, but in fact, gives the reader tools to do it. A classic of Jewish spiritual renewal.

Bound for Montana is an abridgement of the prize-winning two volume series, Journeys to the Land of Gold. The abridgement includes diary and journal excerpts from travelers moving overland in the 1860s, bound for Montana.

WINNER OF THE PRESIGIOUS ETISALAT AWARD AN ADVENTURE-FILLED HISTORICAL-FOLKLORIC NOVEL ABOUT A PALESTINIAN GIRL WHO DEVELOPS GREAT HEALING SKILLS AND TRAVELS AROUND THE REGION, SOMETIMES DRESSED AS A MAN Sonia Nimr’s award-winning Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands is a richly imagined feminist-fable-plus-historical-novel that tells an episodic travel narrative, like that of the great 14th century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, through the eyes of a clever and irrepressible young Palestinian woman. The story begins hundreds of years ago, when our hero—Qamr—is born as an outcast, at the foot of a mountain in Palestine, near her father’s strange, isolated village. Qamr’s mother must solve the mystery of why only boys are born in this odd, conservative village. Then, in 1001 Nights style, this tale moves into another. Qamr’s parents die and a prince with many wives wants to marry her. Qamr takes her favorite book, Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, and flees through Gaza, to Egypt, where she is captured, enslaved, and sold to the sister of the mad king in Egypt. After escaping, she flees to study with a polymath in Morocco. But when it’s discovered she’s a girl, she must leave again, disguising herself as a boy pirate to sail the Mediterranean. Through all her fast-paced battles, mysteries, and adventures, Qamr never finds a home, but she does manage to create a family.

“Translated with grace and precision . . . gives us a rare glimpse of how Asian religion and life appeared from the perspective of the Tibetan plateau.” —Janet Gyatso, Harvard University In 1941, philosopher and poet Gendun Chopel sent a manuscript by ship, train, and yak across mountains and deserts to his homeland in Tibet. He would follow it five years later, returning to his native land after twelve years in India and Sri Lanka. But he did not receive the welcome he imagined: he was arrested by the government of the regent of the young Dalai Lama on trumped-up charges of treason. He emerged from prison three years later a broken man and died soon after. Gendun Chopel was a prolific writer, yet he considered that manuscript, to be his life’s work, one to delight his compatriots with tales of an ancient Indian and Tibetan past, Now available for the first time in English, Grains of Gold is a unique compendium of South Asian and Tibetan culture that combines travelogue, drawings, history, and ethnography. Chopel describes the world he discovered in South Asia, from the ruins of the sacred sites of Buddhism to the Sanskrit classics he learned to read in the original. He is also sharply, often humorously critical of the Tibetan love of the fantastic, bursting one myth after another and finding fault with the accounts of earlier Tibetan pilgrims. The work of an extraordinary scholar, Grains of Gold is a compelling work animated by a sense of discovery of both a distant past and a strange present. “The magnum opus of arguably the single most brilliant Tibetan scholar of the twentieth century.” —Lauran Hartley, Columbia University

In 1896, a small group of prospectors discovered a stunningly rich pocket of gold at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, and in the following two years thousands of individuals traveled to the area, hoping to find wealth in a rugged and challenging setting. Ever since that time, the Klondike Gold Rush - especially as portrayed in photographs of long lines of gold seekers marching up Chilkoot Pass - has had a hold on the popular imagination. In this first environmental history of the gold rush, Kathryn Morse describes how the miners got to the Klondike, the mining technologies they employed, and the complex networks by which they obtained food, clothing, and tools. She looks at the political and economic debates surrounding the valuation of gold and the emerging industrial economy that exploited its extraction in Alaska, and explores the ways in which a web of connections among America’s transportation, supply, and marketing industries linked miners to other industrial and agricultural laborers across the country. The profound economic and cultural transformations that supported the Alaska-Yukon gold rush ultimately reverberate to modern times. The story Morse tells is often narrated through the diaries and letters of the miners themselves. The daunting challenges of traveling, working, and surviving in the raw wilderness are illustrated not only by the miners’ compelling accounts but by newspaper reports and advertisements. Seattle played a key role as “gateway to the Klondike.” A public relations campaign lured potential miners to the West and local businesses seized the opportunity to make large profits while thousands of gold seekers streamed through Seattle. The drama of the miners’ journeys north, their trials along the gold creeks, and their encounters with an extreme climate will appeal not only to scholars of the western environment and of late-19th-century industrialism, but to readers interested in reliving the vivid adventure of the West’s last great gold rush.