"If I had not spent my year in North Dakota, I would never have become President of the United States," declared Theodore Roosevelt. The future statesman took his first steps toward the highest office in the land in the Dakota Badlands of the 1880s, where he began his transformation from aristocrat to democrat. Roosevelt left his home in the East as Theodore, but he returned as "Teddy," a rugged outdoorsman and soon-to-be hero of the Rough Riders....

“The best all-around study of the American cowboy ever written. Every page crackles with keen analysis and vivid prose about the Old West. A must-read!” — Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America
The open-range cattle era lasted barely a quarter century, but it left America irrevocably changed. Cattle Kingdom reveals how the West rose...

"Seventeen-year-old Wilsey Grant is on his own when he meets a traveler on foot. The two arrive in the town of Silver Grass, where the other man finds work washing dishes. Wilsey goes out to look for work and meets an indentured servant girl, an orphan like himself. Before long, the fellow traveler turns up dead. Wilsey goes to work at the nearby Emerald Peaks Ranch, where he hears of ranch hands terrorizing the settlers, and he witnesses the shooting...

In nineteenth-century Texas, a young boy learns a great deal about life on the range when he is at last allowed to accompany the ranch hands on the spring roundup.

Gunneson City Sheriff "Doc" Cyrus Wells Shores (1844-1934)-nicknamed after the doctor who delivered him in Hicksville, Detroit in 1844-became well-known as a Colorado lawman for bringing down local criminals without parading his authority or a display of guns. Born in the village of Hicksville, about thirty miles from Detroit, Michigan, "Doc" Shores moved to Montana as a young man via a steamer and paid passage by hunting game along the route. Prospecting...