Howard R. Lamar

During the early years of the U.S. Republic, its vital southwestern quadrant - encompassing the modern-day states between South Carolina and Louisiana - experienced nearly unceasing conflict. In The Old Southwest, 1795-1830: Frontiers in Conflict, historians Thomas D. Clark and John D. W. Guice analyze the many disputes that resulted when the United States pushed aside a hundred thousand Indians and overtook the final vestiges of Spanish, French, and British presence in the wilderness. Leaders such as Andrew Jackson, who emerged during the Creek War, introduced new policies of Indian removal and state making, along with a decided willingness to let adventurous settlers open up the new territories as a part of the Manifest Destiny of a growing country.

The Utah War remains an understudied but important moment in western history as the United States wrestled with its political future. There are few primary accounts from this war, but one of the best comes from William Clark, a young teamster hired by Russell, Majors and Waddell, the West’s greatest freighters. Clark’s narrative, “A Trip across the Plains in 1857,” was not published until 1922 and only then in an obscure journal with little annotation, so for the last hundred years, this work has been a valuable but obscure document. In On the Overland Trails with William Clark William P. MacKinnon and Kenneth L. Alford have remedied this historiographical oversight by providing material entirely missing from the original printing, including an explanation of the Utah War’s origins and prosecution; maps by which to chart Clark’s travels; illustrations to enliven major players; and annotations to clarify the sometimes arcane people, places, incidents, and issues mentioned. Also included for the first time is an account of the manuscript’s colorful provenance.

Charlie Siringo (1855-1928) lived the quintessential life of adventure on the American frontier as a cowboy, Pinkerton detective, writer, and later as a consultant for early western films. Siringo was one of the most attractive, bold, and original characters to live and flourish in the final decades of the Wild West. His love of the cattle business and of cowboy life were so great that in 1885 he published A Texas Cowboy, or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony--Taken From Real Life, which Will Rogers dubbed the "Cowboy's Bible."Howard R. Lamar's biography deftly shares Siringo's story within seventy-five pivotal years of western history. Siringo was not a mere observer but a participant in major historical events including the Coeur d'Alene mining strikes of the 1890s and Big Bill Haywood's trial in 1907. Lamar focuses on Siringo's youthful struggles to employ his abundant athleticism and ambitions and how Siringo's varied experiences helped develop the compelling national myth of the cowboy.

In 1849, William R. Goulding and the Knickerbocker Exploring Company struck out for California on the southern route--a road less traveled. This rare first-person diary of the southern Gold Rush trails, introduced and annotated by Patricia A. Etter, highlights an important alternative route to the Pacific Coast. One of the best-educated Gold Rush participants, Goulding kept a remarkably articulate journal that recounts his meetings with the interesting and important people he encountered along the way. He describes the details of the trail itself--the weather and scenery, birds and animals, and a march "amidst heards sic] of miriads of buffalo in all directions as far as the eyes could reach." Goulding also recorded encounters with Hispanics and American Indians.

Eleven thought-provoking experts from the United States and Canada explore society, culture, and change in the great, resource-laden Northwest. Essays examine the European exploration of the Pacific coast, American and Canadian comparative development, the political and constitutional foundations, economic globalization, gendered and class history, and perspectives on the Native American, black, Asian American, and Hispanic citizenry.Included are contributions by Susan Armitage, Kenneth S. Coates, James M. Dolliver, Gordon Hirabayashi, Alvin M. Josephy Jr., Howard R. Lamar, John McClelland Jr., E. Mark Moreno, Quintard Taylor, David J. Weber, and Donald Worster. Terra Northwest continues the Sherman and Mabel Smith Pettyjohn Lecture Series of publications examining the essential aspects of Northwest history.

"Texas is not a place, it is a commotion!" exclaimed one early visitor to the state, underscoring the mobility and "get-ahead" spirit that have always characterized Texas and its people. In these thought-provoking essays, Howard R. Lamar looks specifically at the "crossings" that have characterized Texas history to see what effect these migrations to and through Texas have had on Texas, the Southwest, and links between Texas and California.Originally presented in 1986 at the University of Texas at Austin as the first George W. Littlefield Lectures in American History, these essays explore a previously neglected aspect of the western story: the influence of Texans—and other Southerners—on the character and history of the southwestern states. Lamar discusses the many efforts to establish overland trails, and later railroads, to California and how those efforts were fueled by the gold rush era of 1849–1850. He traces the influence of immigrant Texans and the flourishing southern community in California, particularly during the Civil War years. He follows the twentieth-century migration of "Okies," whose desire to settle and resume their agricultural lifeways clashed with Californians' preference for migrant workers. And he reveals how the discovery of oil, not only in Texas but also in California, western Canada, and Alaska, continues to link these regions.Texas has always been a place that people pass through, going either east-west or north-south. Texas Crossings explains what brought the people to Texas and what they carried away with them to California and the West.

In June 1846 Susan Shelby Magoffin, eighteen years old and a bride of less than eight months, set out with her husband, a veteran Santa Fe trader, on a trek from Independence, Missouri, through New Mexico and south to Chihuahua. Her travel journal was written at a crucial time, when the Mexican War was beginning and New Mexico was occupied by Stephen Watts Kearny and the Army of the West. Her journal describes the excitement, routine, and dangers of a successful merchant's wife. On the trail for fifteen months, moving from house to house and town to town, she became adept in Spanish and the lingo of traders, and wrote down in detail the customs and appearances of places she went. She gave birth to her first child during the journey and admitted, "This thing of marrying is not what it is cracked up to be."Valuable as a social and historical record of her encounters—she met Zachary Taylor and was agreeably disappointed to find him disheveled but kindly—her journal is equally important as a chronicle of her growing intelligence, experience, and strength, her lost illusions and her coming to terms with herself.