The Battle For The Buffalo River

Under the auspices of the 1938 Flood Control Act, the U.S. Corps of Engineers began to pursue an aggressive dam-building campaign. A grateful public generally lauded their efforts, but when they turned their attention to Arkansas’s Buffalo River, the vocal opposition their proposed projects generated dumbfounded them. Never before had anyone challenged the Corps’s assumption that damming a river was an improvement. Led by Neil Compton, a physician in Bentonville, Arkansas, a group of area conservationists formed the Ozark Society to join the battle for the Buffalo. This book is the account of this decade-long struggle that drew in such political figures as supreme court justice William O. Douglas, Senator J. William Fulbright, and Governor Orval Faubus. The battle finally ended in 1972 with President Richard Nixon’s designation of the Buffalo as the first national river. Drawing on hundreds of personal letters, photographs, maps, newspaper articles, and reminiscences, Compton’s lively book details the trials, gains, setbacks, and ultimate triumph in one of the first major skirmishes between environmentalists and developers.

These wonderfully detailed, beautifully printed photographs are about adventures and discoveries: the Buffalo River and its towering bluffs, side canyons with hidden waterfalls, natural bridges, historic places, and more.

Ken Smith's life-long accumulation of knowledge about the Buffalo River country, including complete trail and river guides and a fascinating sourcebook for geology and history of the Buffalo river area. All in a compact size, with more than 170 photos, maps, and diagrams. Coordinated with National Geographic Maps, Trails Illustrated. Ken Smith is the author-photographer of The Buffalo River Country, the Ozark Society Foundation classic now in its ninth printing.

Battles of the Red River War unearths a long-buried record of the collision of two cultures. In 1874, U.S. forces led by Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie carried out a surprise attack on several Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa bands that had taken refuge in the Palo Duro Canyon of the Texas panhandle and destroyed their winter stores and horses. After this devastating loss, many of these Indians returned to their reservations and effectively brought to a close what has come to be known as the Red River War, a campaign carried out by the U.S. Army during 1874 as a result of Indian attacks on white settlers in the region. After this operation, the Southern Plains Indians would never again pose a coherent threat to whites’ expansion and settlement across their ancestral homelands. Until now, the few historians who have undertaken to tell the story of the Red River War have had to rely on the official records of the battles and a handful of extant accounts, letters, and journals of the U.S. Army participants. Starting in 1998, J. Brett Cruse, under the auspices of the Texas Historical Commission, conducted archeological investigations at six battle sites. In the artifacts they unearthed, Cruse and his teams found clues that would both correct and complete the written records and aid understanding of the Indian perspectives on this clash of cultures. Including a chapter on historiography and archival research by Martha Doty Freeman and an analysis of cartridges and bullets by Douglas D. Scott, this rigorously researched and lavishly illustrated work will commend itself to archeologists, military historians and scientists, and students and scholars of the Westward Expansion.

Describes the decade-long struggle by area conservationists to prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from building a dam on Arkansas' Buffalo River

A captivating and historical story of two young men on opposing sides of war. In 1874, the U.S. Army sent troops to subdue and move the Native Americans of the southern plains to reservations. Brothers of the Buffalo follows Private Washington Vance Jr., an African-American calvaryman, and Wolf, a Cheyenne warrior, during the brief and brutal war that followed. Filled with action and suspense from both sides of the battle, this is a tale of conflict and unlikely friendship in the Wild West.

A timeless book about a river and its people, so well and lovingly written that its interwoven fact and legend has that special quality of good storytelling. The now famous Buffalo River is one of the last free-flowing rivers in America. The book will appeal to all who are drawn by the magic of the river - the nature lover, canoeist and backpacker - and certainly to those with an historical interest in the region.

A new and complete history of Zululand, and its destruction at the hands of the British in 1879. This book is not only a complete history of the Zulus but also an account of the way the British won absolute rule in South Africa. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Shaka Zulu established a nation in south-east Africa which was to become the most politically sophisticated and militarily powerful black nation in the entire area. Although the Zulus never had any quarrel with their British neighbours, the rulers of the Cape Colony could not conceive of them as anything but a threat. In 1879, under dubious pretences, the British finally crossed the Buffalo River, and embarked on a bloody war that was to rock the very foundations of the British Empire. The story is studded with tales of incredible heroism, drama and atrocity on both sides: the Battle of Isandlwana, where the Zulus inflicted on the British the worst defeat a modern army has ever suffered at the hands of men without guns; Rorke's Drift, where a handful of British troops beat off thousands of Zulu warriors and won a record 11 VCs; and Ulundi, where the Zulus were finally crushed in a battle that was to herald some of the most shameful episodes in British Colonial history. Comprehensive, vast in scope, and filled with original and up-to-date research, this is a book that is set to replace all standard works on the subject.

This first novel in a new series introduces former runaway slave Nate Gordon. Three years after leaving Louisiana, Nate returns as Sergeant Major of the Tenth United States Cavalry. His task is to form the second U.S. colored cavalry, the Ninth Negro. Poverty, corruption, and crime now thrive in the postwar South. Nate struggles keep outside forces at bay as the Ninth Cavalry moves from the docks of Louisiana to the wide open West.