Sarah Waller Hatfield

Sheriff and outlaw Henry Plummer needed no introduction to the citizens of Montana Territory in the mid-nineteenth century. And well into the twentieth century, Frank Bird Linderman sought out the stories of the people who knew Plummer—and ultimately hanged him. In 1920 Linderman completed a novel about Plummer's life, but it was rejected by publisher after publisher. They felt that it showed too much fidelity to historical truth for a public increasingly enamored of western dime novels. Eighty years later, Linderman's lively interpretation of one of Montana's most enduring legends is being published for the first time. Plummer scarcely resembled the model sheriffs of movie and television westerns. Coolly calculating, he used his position as sheriff of Bannack during Montana Territory's first gold rush to organize a band of road agents who systematically robbed and murdered miners in remote areas. The highwaymen became so brazen that the miners felt compelled to band together and wage a vigorous lynch-law campaign to restore order. In 1864 these vigilantes caught up with Plummer and delivered their own brand of justice.

"Bears are commonly misquoted." That's what Frank B. Linderman concluded after spending most of his life in the wild. In Big Jinny Linderman lets a little grizzly cub speak for herself, and Jinny has plenty to say. This is Jinny's story about growing up in the Montana wilderness, where every day promises adventure, mischief—and danger. She and her brother cub, Jim, learn from their mother about eating, playing, avoiding certain animals—and, most important of all, minding their own business. But when Jinny wakes up from her first hibernation, curiosity tempts her to ignore this most important lesson and travel far from home, minding everybody else's business while learning a few new lessons about what it is to be a grizzly bear. Big Jinny's story, steeped in nature lore and illustrated with Elizabeth Lochrie's lush watercolors, leads readers young and old on an enchanting adventure through the wilds of western America even as they learn, with Jinny, how grizzlies really live.

In 1822 Elijah Mounts, barely eighteen, shoulders his rifle and walks from his uncle's Missouri farm to Saint Louis to seek his fortune in the fur trade. Frank B. Linderman's 1922 novel is a first-person account, based on a true story and his own trapping experience, of a young man's coming of age among the trappers and Indians in remote Montana, on the upper reaches of the wild Missouri River. Befriended by Wash Lamkin, "Dad" to all who know him, "Lige" learns to live on the trail, trap the beaver, hunt the buffalo, speak the Cree language, and observe the customs of the country and its people. Enamored of the freedom, wildness, and beauty of the high plains and tied to the people at whose hands he has experienced kindness, welcome, and acceptance, he must ultimately decide whether he will return to civilization or choose the life of a plainsman.