Southwestern Frontier History and Historical Fiction
Explore the rugged tales of the Southwestern Frontier with our curated list of historical fiction and history books. Dive into gripping stories of adventure, conflict, and culture in the Old West.
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Blood and Thunder
by Hampton Sides
In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of "Manifest Destiny," this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness. In Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides gives us a magnificent history of the American conquest of the West. At the center of this sweeping tale is Kit Carson, the trapper, scout, and soldier whose adventures made him a legend. Sides shows us how this illiterate mountain man understood and respected the Western tribes better than any other American, yet willingly followed orders that would ultimately devastate the Navajo nation. Rich in detail and spanning more than three decades, this is an essential addition to our understanding of how the West was really won. Book jacket.
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Lonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
Tells of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana and shows how one man's dream to create an empire affects others.
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Comanches
by T.R. Fehrenbach
Authoritative and immediate, this is the classic account of the most powerful of the American Indian tribes. T.R. Fehrenbach traces the Comanches’ rise to power, from their prehistoric origins to their domination of the high plains for more than a century until their demise in the face of Anglo-American expansion. Master horseback riders who lived in teepees and hunted bison, the Comanches were stunning orators, disciplined warriors, and the finest makers of arrows. They lived by a strict legal code and worshipped within a cosmology of magic. As he portrays the Comanche lifestyle, Fehrenbach re-creates their doomed battle against European encroachment. While they destroyed the Spanish dream of colonizing North America and blocked the French advance into the Southwest, the Comanches ultimately fell before the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Army in the great raids and battles of the mid-nineteenth century. This is a classic American story, vividly and poignantly told.
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The Captured
by Scott Zesch
A descendant of a white man who embraced Native American culture after his capture in 1870 offers insight into how and why non-native captives became fiercely loyal members of the tribes into which they were adopted.
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The Buffalo War
by James L. Haley
The U.S. Army battles three powerful Indian tribes, the Comanches, Kiowas and Southern Cheyennes, in the Texas Panhandle. Originally published in 1976.
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The Buckskin Line
by Elmer Kelton
In 1861, Rusty Shannon, whose family was killed by a Comanche war party twenty years earlier, rides out from the family homestead to join a company of Texas volunteers dedicated to protecting settlers against Indian raids.
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The Texas Rangers
by Mike Cox
Explores the history of the Texas Rangers from their origin in 1821 to protect the settlers from the Karankawa Indians, and describes how they became one of the fiercest law enforcement groups in America.
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All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The first volume in the Border Trilogy, from the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
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The Kiowa Verdict
by Cynthia Haseloff
This Spur Award-winning novel is set in 1871, when members of an Indian war party are put on trial to defend their brutal attack of a wagon train. The chiefs are tried in a Texas courtroom, with a former Indian fighter to defend them. Will a fair trial be possible?
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The North Fork
by Don Butler
Recounts the unique--but often overlooked--history of a land that was once a part of Comancheria, the home of the Comanches and Kiowas until control of the region is wrested from the tribes during the turbulent years following the Civil War.
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The Searchers
by Alan Le May
The epic American Western classic from the author of The Unforgiven. Twice Mart Pauley had watched as the bloodthirsty Commanches destroyed everything he held dear. The first time he was a helpless child. But the second time, when they slaughtered his adopted family and took a young girl hostage, he was a man. A man who could seek revenge . . .
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Killing Cynthia Ann
by Charles Brashear
Late in 1860, she and toddler Topsannah (as the whites called her) were recaptured by Texas rangers and returned to "civilization" and the extended Parker clan."--BOOK JACKET.
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Ride the Wind
by Lucia St. Clair Robson
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The story of Cynthia Ann Parker and the last days of the Comanche In 1836, when she was nine years old, Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanche Indians from her family's settlement. She grew up with them, mastered their ways, and married one of their leaders. Except for her brilliant blue eyes and golden mane, Cynthia Ann Parker was in every way a Comanche woman. They called her Naduah—Keeps Warm With Us. She rode a horse named Wind. This is her story, the story of a proud and innocent people whose lives pulsed with the very heartbeat of the land. It is the story of a way of life that is gone forever. It will thrill you, absorb you, touch your soul, and make you cry as you celebrate the beauty and mourn the end of the great Comanche nation.
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The Last Comanche Chief
by Bill Neeley
Critical acclaim for The Last Comanche Chief "Truly distinguished. Neeley re-creates the character and achievements of this most significant of all Comanche leaders." -- Robert M. Utley author of The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull "A vivid, eyewitness account of life for settlers and Native Americans in those violent and difficult times." -- Christian Science Monitor "The special merits of Neeley's work include its reliance on primary sources and illuminating descriptions of interactions among Southern Plains people, Native and white." -- Library Journal "He has given us a fuller and clearer portrait of this extraordinary Lord of the South Plains than we've ever had before." -- The Dallas Morning News
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Bad Medicine & Good
by Wilbur Sturtevant Nye
One of the great tribes of the Southwest Plains, the Kiowas were militantly defiant toward white intruders in their territory and killed more during seventy-five years of raiding than any other tribe. Now settled in southwestern Oklahoma, they are today one of the most progressive Indian groups in the area. In Bad Medicine and Good, Wilbur Sturtevant Nye collects forty-four stories covering Kiowa history from the 1700s through the 1940s, all gleaned from interviews with Kiowas (who actually took part in the events or recalled them from the accounts of their elders), and from the notes of Captain Hugh L Scott at Fort Sill. They cover such topics as the organization and conduct of a raiding party, the brave deeds of war chiefs, the treatment of white captives, the Grandmother gods, the Kiowa sun dance, and the problems of adjusting to white society.
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The Indian Frontier 1846-1890
by Robert M. Utley
First published in 1984, Robert Utley's The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890, is considered a classic for both students and scholars. For this revision, Utley includes scholarship and research that has become available in recent years. What they said about the first edition: "[The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890] provides an excellent synthesis of Indian-white relations in the trans-Mississippi West during the last half-century of the frontier period."--Journal of American History "The Indian Frontier of the American West combines good writing, solid research, and penetrating interpretations. The result is a fresh and welcome study that departs from the soldier-chases-Indian approach that is all too typical of other books on the topic."--Minnesota History "[Robert M. Utley] has carefully eschewed sensationalism and glib oversimplification in favor of critical appraisal, and his firm command of some of the best published research of others provides a solid foundation for his basic argument that Indian hostility in the half century following the Mexican War was directed less at the white man per se than at the hated reservation system itself."--Pacific Historical Review Choice Magazine Outstanding Selection
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Carbine and Lance
by Wilbur Sturtevant Nye
Fort Sill is in the heart of the old Kiowa-Comanche Indian country in southwestern Oklahoma. For the student of the American frontier, Fort Sill is the center of one of the most interesting, dramatic, and sustained series of conflicts known in the history of the West.
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Washita : the U.S. Army and the Southern Cheyennes, 1867-1869
by Jerome A. Greene
In this remarkably balanced history, Jerome A. Greene describes Custer attack on the Cheyenne at the Washita River--its causes, conduct, and consequences--even as he addresses the multiple controversies surrounding the conflict.
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Once They Moved Like The Wind
by David Roberts
Recounts the days of the Indian wars when the U.S. Cavalry repeatedly tried to subdue the great warriors led by Cochise and, later, Geronimo.
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Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather
From one of the most highly acclaimed novelists of the twentieth century: a truly remarkable book" (The New York Times), an epic story of a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert. With a new introduction by Claire Messud. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows—gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.
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In Dull Knife's Wake
by Vernon R. Maddux
In 1877, after the defeat of Custer at Little Bighorn, the U.S. Government removed the Northern Cheyenne from their traditional homelands to a reservation in Indian Territory(Oklahoma.) This is the story surrounding the breakout of the Northern Cheyenne from Darlington Reservation in 1878 and their bloody but futile attempt to return to their homeland in Montana.
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Telegraph Days
by Larry McMurtry
Recounts myths of the closing decades of the western frontier viewed through the eyes of Nellie Courtright and her brother Jackson, orphans that make good in the town of Rita Blanca in what would become the Oklahoma Panhandle.
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Tribal Wars of the Southern Plains
by Stan Hoig
Few people who cross the Great Plains today recollect that for centuries the land was a battleground where Indian nations fought one another for their own survival and then stood bravely against the irrepressible forces of white civilization. Even among those aware of the history, Plains Indian conflicts have been seen largely in terms of American conquest. In this readable narrative history, well-known Indian historian Stan Hoig tells how the native peoples of the southern plains have struggled continually to retain their homelands and their way of life. Tribal Wars of the Southern Plains is a comprehensive account of Indian conflicts in the area between the Platte River and the Rio Grande, from the first written reports of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century through the United States-Cheyenne Battle of the Sand Hills in 1875. The reader follows the exploits and defeats of such chiefs as Lone Wolf, Satanta, Black Kettle, and Dull Knife as they signed treaties, led attacks, battled for land, and defended their villages in the huge region that was home to the Wichitas, Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, Osages, Pawnees, and other Indian nations. Unlike many previous studies of the Plains Indian wars, this one-volume synthesis chronicles not only the Indian-white wars but also the Indian-Indian conflicts. Of central importance are the intertribal wars that preceded the arrival of the Spaniards and continued during the next three centuries, particularly as white incursions on the north and east forced tribes from those regions onto the Great Plains. Stan Hoig details the numerous battles and the major treaties. He also explains the warrior ethic, which persists even among Plains Indian veterans today; the dual societal structure of peace and war chiefs within the tribes, in which both sometimes acted at cross-purposes, much the same as the U.S. government and frontier whites; techniques and tactics of Plains Indian warfare; and the role of medicine men, the Sun Dance, and spirituality in Plains warfare. This is a perfect introduction to an important era in the Indian history of North America by an acknowledged expert.
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Eyewitnesses to the Indian wars : 1865 - 1890. 3. Conquering the Southern Plains
by Peter Cozzens
No summary available.
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Dying Thunder
by Terry C. Johnston
Seamus Donegan and his men follow an ever more scarce herd into the Kiowa and Comanche's sacred hunting ground. Now Donegan and a handful of men must hold off any army of braves in one of the bloodiest battles of the Plains.