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    Historic Photos of Heroes of the Old West
    Historic Photos of Heroes of the Old West
    Historic Photos of Heroes of the Old West
    Ebook242 pages1 hour

    Historic Photos of Heroes of the Old West

    By Mike Cox

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    No story in United States history is more compelling than the exploration and settlement of the American West, and the tales of those who blazed the trails will forever enthrall Americans yet unborn. In Historic Photos of Heroes of the Old West, the dauntless adventurers who gave us the legend come alive together in profile. Herein are the early pathfinders Zebulon Pike and Lewis and Clark, James Marshall and men of the gold rush, the lawmen Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok. George Armstrong Custer returns to the Little Big Horn and John Wesley Powell revisits the Colorado River. And Mark Twain, Buffalo Bill, and Charles Russell breathe the legend to life. A sagely written brush with the lore and romance of the Old West, this roundup of the most famous frontiersmen includes nearly 200 photographs, reproduced vividly in black-and-white, with captions and introductions by author and historian Mike Cox. Here are the fables and the faces of Americans double-tough, for every adventurer seeking an encounter with the great American West.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTurner Publishing Company
    Release dateMay 28, 2010
    ISBN9781618583970
    Historic Photos of Heroes of the Old West
    Author

    Mike Cox

    An elected member of the prestigious Texas Institute of Letters, Mike Cox is the author of thirty-six non-fiction books. Over a freelance career of more than forty-five years, he also has written hundreds of articles and essays for a wide variety of national and regional publications. His bestselling work has been a two-volume, 250,000-word history of the Texas Rangers published in 2008. When not writing, he spends as much time as he can traveling, fishing, hunting and looking for new stories to tell.

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      Book preview

      Historic Photos of Heroes of the Old West - Mike Cox

      HISTORIC PHOTOS OF

      HEROES OF THE

      OLD WEST

      TEXT AND CAPTIONS BY MIKE COX

      The Corps of Discovery, as it was called, traveled more than 4,000 miles from the mouth of the Missouri to the Pacific. And then they trekked back to St. Louis, Missouri, where they arrived on September 23, 1806.

      HISTORIC PHOTOS OF

      HEROES OF THE

      OLD WEST

      Turner Publishing Company

      200 4th Avenue North • Suite 950

      Nashville, Tennessee 37219

      (615) 255-2665

      www.turnerpublishing.com

      Historic Photos of Heroes of the Old West

      Copyright © 2010 Turner Publishing Company

      All rights reserved.

      This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2009939389

      ISBN: 978-1-59652-568-9

      Printed in China

      10 11 12 13 14 15 16—0  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

      CONTENTS

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      PREFACE

      THE PATHFINDERS

      THE PIONEERS

      THEY SPANNED A CONTINENT

      THE CIVILIZERS

      PURVEYORS OF THE MYTH

      NOTES ON THE PHOTOGRAPHS

      Stephen Harriman Long (1784–1864), as an officer in the U.S. Army’s Topographical Engineers, explored the West during various expeditions from 1817 to 1821. In his most ambitious trek he led an entourage of soldiers, scientists, artists, and topographers on an exploration of the Rockies, the upper Arkansas River, the Red River, and the Canadian River. While he oversaw the gathering of considerable data, Long famously concluded that the West amounted to a great desert unsuited for settlement.

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      This volume, Historic Photos of Heroes of the Old West, is the result of the cooperation and efforts of many individuals and organizations. It is with great thanks that we acknowledge the valuable contribution of the following for their generous support:

      Denver Public Library

      Library of Congress

      Mike Cox

      National Archives and Records Administration

      University of Oklahoma Libraries

      University of Texas at San Antonio, Institute of Texan Cultures

      Wikimedia Commons

      PREFACE

      It’s easy to look at history simply as a succession of events and dates. But with the exception of natural phenomena like earthquakes, significant occurrences—be they great discoveries or brutal massacres—do not happen without people.

      The saga of America’s westward movement is the story of people, many of whom we can consider heroes and heroines. Not that the Old West didn’t have plenty of rascals, from scalp hunters to outlaws and crooked businessmen and politicians, but the heroes were the ones who explored, settled, spanned, and civilized the West.

      Though the story of the American West is as big as the West itself, when it comes to heroes, they can be grouped into five broad categories: The pathfinders who literally blazed the trails for others to follow as a young nation pursued what some considered its Manifest Destiny to span the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific; the pioneers of various stripe who followed; the builders and innovators who spanned the continent with improved means of transportation and communication or provided the tools to tame it; the civilizers who settled things down; and last, the perpetrators of the Western myth, a story that hardly needed embellishment but got it anyway.

      The earliest Western exploration occurred before the invention of photography, but the technology existed in time to capture some of the pathfinders as older men. As the state of the photographic art continued to grow along with the West, the time considered to be the peak of the epoch—the last half of the nineteenth century—was well documented by men who captured images on emulsion-covered glass plates.

      Human drama needs a stage, both figuratively and literally. With the story of the Old West, the action unfolds on a stage that extends westward from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, an area that now includes 23 states not counting Hawaii. But the eastern tier of Western states—Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana—didn’t stay western for long. In the collective imagination of most Americans, the real West begins on a line from North Dakota to Texas where relatively flat land reaches for the Rocky Mountains and beyond.

      The acquisition of most of this vast territory boils down to four big land deals, starting with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. That year, in consideration of $11.25 million in actual cost and another $8 million in assumed debt, President Thomas Jefferson signed off on the purchase of some eight million square miles from France. For roughly four cents an acre, the U.S. had doubled in size.

      In 1845, the United States annexed the independent Republic of Texas, making it the 28th state. Following the war with Mexico that development brought about, in negotiations completed in 1850, the U.S. acquired all or part of the land that eventually became the states of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. In between, the nation got title to the Oregon Territory from Great Britain in 1846. That included the future states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.

      Not quite 50 years later, in 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave a speech in Chicago in which he declared the frontier dead. But the Indian Territory (Oklahoma), New Mexico, and Arizona did not lose their territorial status and become states until the first and second decades of the twentieth century. Some say the Old West lived on in some places until the United States entered the First World War in

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