Gary L. Roberts, Emeritus Professor of History, Abraham Baldwin College, is widely recognized as a historian of the American West and frontier violence. He has published more than seventy-five articles on Western history and coedited a book on Georgia politics. He is the author of Death Comes for the Chief Justice: The Slough-Rynerson Quarrel and Political Violence in New Mexico.

As the bloody Civil War ends, teenager Eliza Mooney sets out on foot from Baton Rouge to find her brother and only remaining kin, 12-year-old Jeddo Mooney. The young drummer boy survived the war to become the surrogate son of General James O'Keefe, a man with a disreputable past and now acting governor of an untamed mountain territory

The women who traveled west in covered wagons during the 1840s speak through these letters and diaries. Here are the voices of Tamsen Donner and young Virginia Reed, members of the ill-fated Donner party; Patty Sessions, the Mormon midwife who delivered five babies on the trail between Omaha and Salt Lake City; Rachel Fisher, who buried both her husband and her little girl before reaching Oregon. Still others make themselves heard, starting out from...

Describes travel, indians, animals, found while traveling west between 1840 - 1846.

Presents essays, jokes, riddles, and suggested readings on aspects of the Wild West, from the Oregon Trail to the Alamo, from Native Americans to cowboys, from explorers to outlaws.