True Tales Of The American Southwest

The cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you. Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night. From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.

Offers several true stories of the old West, ranging from humorous to touching to tragic and violent - all told with frankness and candour. They offer interesting glimpses of the role of ranchers and other settlers, cowboys, adventurers, soldiers, and lawmen in the history of the region.

With its vast vistas, splendid sunsets, and rich history, the American Southwest has always inspired superb writing. "Travelers' Tales Southwest" features a choice selection of some of the best by Tony Hillerman, David Roberts, Barbara Kingsolver, Alex Schoumatoff, Terry Tempest Williams, Edward Abbey, and others. Maps.

This collection of tales will bring its readers plenty of delicious shivers.

"From 1899 to 1906, Colonel Baylor wrote fifty-two articles for the El Paso Daily Herald. The articles, ably edited and annotated by historian Thompson, vary from accounts of the Civil War in El Paso and the Mesilla Valley, to fights with Comanches in North Texas and Victorio's Apaches in the mountains of Chihuahua. Baylor also recalls the ill-fated 1850-1851 Parker H. French Expedition and life in the California gold fields. Also included are biographical sketches of "Don Santiago" Magoffin and Baylor's controversial older brother, Col. John Robert Baylor." "Some of Baylor's most valuable writings are his Civil War recollections. These include accounts of the surrender of Federal forces at St. Agustin Springs, New Mexico in 1861, the massacre of Lt. Reuben E. Mays and fourteen Confederates deep in the arid expanses of the Big Bend, his service as senior aide to Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, the Red River Campaign, and an amazingly objective account of how he came to kill Gen. John A. Wharton at the Fannin Hotel in Houston in April 1865."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their world. Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley, Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would follow them. Their adventures were shared with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Henri, Edgar Hewett and Charles Lummis, Chief Tawakwaptiwa of the Hopi, and Hostiin Klah of the Navajo. Their journeys took them to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, into Canyon de Chelly, and across the high mesas of the Hopi, down through the Grand Canyon, and over the red desert of the Four Corners, to the pueblos along the Rio Grande and the villages in the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos. Although their stories converge in the outback of the American Southwest, the saga of Ladies of the Canyons is also the tale of Boston’s Brahmins, the Greenwich Village avant-garde, the birth of American modern art, and Santa Fe’s art and literary colony. Ladies of the Canyons is the story of New Women stepping boldly into the New World of inconspicuous success, ambitious failure, and the personal challenges experienced by women and men during the emergence of the Modern Age.

With its soaring azure sky and stark landscapes, the American Southwest is one of the most hauntingly beautiful regions on earth. Yet staggering population growth, combined with the intensifying effects of climate change, is driving the oasis-based society close to the brink of a Dust-Bowl-scale catastrophe. In A Great Aridness, William deBuys paints a compelling picture of what the Southwest might look like when the heat turns up and the water runs out. This semi-arid land, vulnerable to water shortages, rising temperatures, wildfires, and a host of other environmental challenges, is poised to bear the heaviest consequences of global environmental change in the United States. Examining interrelated factors such as vanishing wildlife, forest die backs, and the over-allocation of the already stressed Colorado River--upon which nearly 30 million people depend--the author narrates the landscape's history--and future. He tells the inspiring stories of the climatologists and others who are helping untangle the complex, interlocking causes and effects of global warming. And while the fate of this region may seem at first blush to be of merely local interest, what happens in the Southwest, deBuys suggests, will provide a glimpse of what other mid-latitude arid lands worldwide--the Mediterranean Basin, southern Africa, and the Middle East--will experience in the coming years. Written with an elegance that recalls the prose of John McPhee and Wallace Stegner, A Great Aridness offers an unflinching look at the dramatic effects of climate change occurring right now in our own backyard.

Growing up in a Spanish American culture in the American West at the turn of the twentieth century invites assimilation, a process made all the more conflicted through the evolving stages of individuation and the tensions of political correctness and hyphenated identities: Anglo-American, Spanish-American, Mexican-American, Native American, and the subcultures of Stompers, Pachucos, Chicanos, Cholos, Indios, and Squares. This book contains a dozen interconnected stories set against these laminated ethnicities. Whether read as love songs or laments these soul stories all serenade the American Southwest and its allure as a landscape of adventure and romance during the transition from Old to New West. It is said that a land determines a people and is determined by them, a belief told lyrically and poignantly in these story serenades. Includes Readers Guide.

Formerly only available as volumes of the individual States, this (Southwest) anthology is one of five (West, Midwest, Northeast, and Southeast are the four others) that combine alternative (wacky/zany) histories of the States of each region, in this case Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. Each anthology also contains, as a bonus, the alternative history of the "Ewe-Knighted States" as a whole.

These entertaining stories from Old West history include cowboys, Indians, lawmen, lawbreakers, entertainers, prostitutes, priests, and politicians. They all helped shape the myth and legend of the American West. This book reveals the stories of characters like Mary Fields, Cleophas Dowd, and Judge Roy Bean, and offers glimpses of gunfights, holdups, mining claim battles, and more.