Way Out West

The roughest, rudest cowpokes on the range are poleaxed and hog-tied over their latest predicament-taking care of a baby lost in the wilderness. Don, Deke, and Dom (the meanest of them all) have to figure out how to feed and change the poor tyke ("Aw shucks ... she's sprung a leak!"). This lushly illustrated tale bubbles with good humour.

A look at the popular culture of the West, including movie cowboys, western clothes, rodeo, the Indian image, food, and animals.

Meet Frank, the coolest coyote ever to make trouble for a Gila monster or two. He's here to show his admirers how he spends a busy day. Like young children, he sometimes pursues active interests with his friends, but at other times he just likes to be alone. Here is a desert tour with Frank as a guide, revealing curious creatures and beautiful scenery. Full color.

In 1862, a British lord named Viscount Milton and his friend from Cambridge, Dr. Cheadle, set out to travel across what is now western Canada. Not only did they want to explore the possibilities of a usable land-route through the Rockies to the Cariboo goldfields, but they craved the adventure an untouched land could provide. Starting their journey in the Red River Colony (Winnipeg), they hired guides and proceeded across the prairie, encountering both Natives and Hudson's Bay Company traders, and enduring a gruelling journey through the Yellowhead Pass, in terrible conditions, down the Thompson River to Kamloops. They moved down the Fraser River from the B.C. interior to New Westminster and took a steamer to Victoria, from which they visited the Cariboo goldfields, and then headed home from Victoria by ship via Panama. Their book about the trip, "The North-West Passage by Land," published in England in 1865, was a huge success. Now Michael Shaw Bond - a great-great-grandson of Viscount Milton, and a London journalist - has also travelled from Winnipeg west in the footsteps of his distinguished ancestor. Hitch-hiking and walking across the prairies, searching near Prince Albert for the descendants of the natives who helped Milton and Cheadle survive their first winter, and encountering both grandeur and extreme discomfort on horseback through the mountains, Bond tackles his experience with curiosity, good humour, and a good deal of Milton's own courage. In the process he discovers not only Milton's trail, but much about Milton - and himself. On his Canadian adventure Milton was able to escape the pressures and expectations of his position, and come to an awareness of what he did well. So too did Bond, dealing with a difficult relationship and a time of uncertainty in his life, find in his adventure a time in which life is reduced to essentials, and priorities are clarified - through the centuries the reward of pilgrimage.

A striking look back at a remarkable period in history Featuring 125 black and white photographs by such renowned Farm Security Administration photographers as Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, and several others, this book documents ranching culture in western states during the Great Depression and leading up to World War II.

a play by Diana Burbano, with additional music by Tom Shelton. Aquilina is a clever, courageous, and imaginative girl who leads a group of orphans in a recently abandoned wild west town. The town should belong to a kindly if wooly headed widow who can’t find the deed. When three mysterious strangers appear to rescue the orphans and start a pie making business it looks like the orphans luck has finally changed. But while the other kids take these kind strangers to heart, Aquilina remains mistrustful and starts to poke her nose into the truth. She discovers that two of the strangers belong to a vicious gang, and are about to sell all the orphans into servitude and take the town for themselves. They’ve also kidnapped a young girl and threaten do harm to the widow. Aquilina, with the help of the young kidnapped girl, tricks the strangers into revealing them- selves, and uses her wits and a lemon cream pie to outsmart the gang and save the town. Dramedy Full-length. 60-70 minutes 15-35+ actors, gender flexible casting

When Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton sat at the piano in the Library of Congress in May of 1938 to begin his monumental series of interviews with Alan Lomax, he spoke of his years on the West Coast with the nostalgia of a man recalling a golden age, a lost Eden. He had arrived in Los Angeles more than twenty years earlier, but he recounted his losses as vividly as though they had occurred just recently. The greatest loss was his separation from Anita Gonzales, by his own account "the only woman I ever loved," to whom he left almost all of his royalties in his will. In Dead Man Blues, Phil Pastras sets the record straight on the two periods (1917-1923 and 1940-1941) that Jelly Roll Morton spent on the West Coast. In addition to rechecking sources, correcting mistakes in scholarly accounts, and situating eyewitness narratives within the histories of New Orleans or Los Angeles, Pastras offers a fresh interpretation of the life and work of Morton, one of the most important and influential early practitioners of jazz. Pastras's discovery of a previously unknown collection of memorabilia—including a 58-page scrapbook compiled by Morton himself—sheds new light on Morton's personal and artistic development, as well as on the crucial role played by Anita Gonzales. In a rich, fast-moving, and fascinating narrative, Pastras traces Morton's artistic development as a pianist, composer, and bandleader. Among many other topics, Pastras discusses the complexities of racial identity for Morton and his circle, his belief in voodoo, his relationships with women, his style of performance, and his roots in black musical traditions. Not only does Dead Man Blues restore to the historical record invaluable information about one of the great innovators of jazz, it also brings to life one of the most colorful and fascinating periods of musical transformation on the West Coast.