Westerners In Gray

Few infantry regiments in the Civil War compiled a more distinguished record than the Fifth Missouri. The unique blending of fiery Irish Confederates from St. Louis with rural pro-Southern Missourians forged an unshakable esprit de corps, making the unit the crack infantry regiment in the western sector. Most of Colonel James C. McCown's troops were young men in their 20s, and their good health and physical conditioning allowed them to carry out their "shock" missions throughout the region. From the perspective of the common soldiers and the unit's leaders the activities and battles of the Fifth Missouri are recounted here.

The Mississippi battle between Grant’s and Pemberton’s forces that sealed Vicksburg’s fate. The Battle of Champion Hill was the decisive land engagement of the Vicksburg Campaign. The fighting on May 16, 1863, took place just twenty miles east of the river city, where the advance of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Federal army attacked Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton’s hastily gathered Confederates. The bloody fighting seesawed back and forth until superior Union leadership broke apart the Southern line, sending Pemberton’s army into headlong retreat. The victory on Mississippi’s wooded hills sealed the fate of both Vicksburg and her large field army, propelled Grant into the national spotlight, and earned him the command of the entire US armed forces. Timothy Smith, a historian for the National Park Service, has written the definitive account of this long-overlooked battle. This book, winner of a nonfiction prize from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, is grounded upon years of primary research, rich in analysis and strategic and tactical action, and a compelling read.

Since the shocking news first broke in 1876 of the Seventh Cavalry’s disastrous defeat at the Little Big Horn, fascination with the battle—and with Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer—has never ceased. Widespread interest in the subject has spawned a vast outpouring of literature, which only increases with time. This two-volume bibliography of Custer literature is the first to be published in some twenty-five years and the most complete ever assembled. Drawing on years of research, Michael O’Keefe has compiled entries for roughly 3,000 books and 7,000 articles and pamphlets. Covering both nonfiction and fiction (but not juvenile literature), the bibliography focuses on events beginning with Custer’s tenure at West Point during the 1850s and ending with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Included within this span are Custer’s experiences in the Civil War and in Texas, the 1873 Yellowstone and 1874 Black Hills expeditions, the Great Sioux War of 1876–77, and the Seventh Cavalry’s pursuit of the Nez Perces in 1877. The literature on Custer, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and the Seventh Cavalry touches the entire American saga of exploration, conflict, and settlement in the West, including virtually all Plains Indian tribes, the frontier army, railroading, mining, and trading. Hence this bibliography will be a valuable resource for a broad audience of historians, librarians, collectors, and Custer enthusiasts.

Two dozen pioneering men and women talk about life out west on the downward slope of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth. It was still rough and raw. Paul Gray rode the cattle trails of the Staked Plain, where ?nobody asked anybody?s name? because ?it wasn?t courtesy.? Jake Goss recalls the fuss when chickens raised on Salt Creek in western Colorado were found to have gold in their craws. J. Selby Batt?s father owned a general store in Wells, Nevada, where a lady could buy yards of ribbon and a gallon of whiskey. ø Other old-timers reminisce about characters like Bat Masterson and the Tabors, range wars, unpopular government representatives, wild longhorns and marauding wolves, boom towns turned ghostly, and unsolved mysteries. Here, too, are the voices of miners, schoolteachers, dentists, businessmen, traveling salesmen, journalists, and writers from frontier Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Oklahoma, and beyond. In an arena like this, ?You could do anything you was big enough to do.?

E-artnow presents to you the ultimate Zane Grey collection, a book set consisting of the most notable novels and stories by this great author of the Western genre. Zane Grey,played a significant role in shaping the myths of the Wild West and paved the way for the western genre as one of its pioneers and the greatest writers of the genre. This edition includes: Betty Zane The Spirit of the Border The Last of the Plainsmen The Last Trail The Heritage of the Desert The Young Forester The Young Lion Hunter Riders of the Purple Sage Desert Gold The Light of the Western Stars The Rustlers of Pecos County The Lone Star Ranger Rainbow Trail The Border Legion Wildfire The UP Trail The Desert of Wheat The Man of the Forest The Mysterious Rider To the Last Man Tales of Lonely Trails Wanderer of the Wasteland Tappan's Burro The Call of the Canyon Roping Lions in the Grand Canyon The Thundering Herd The Vanishing American Under the Tonto Rim Captives of the Desert Wild Horse Mesa The Deer Stalker From Missouri The Great Slave Yaqui Tigre The Rubber Hunter The Ranger Canyon Walls Avalanche Forlorn River Nevada The Shepherd of Guadaloupe Sunset Pass Arizona Ames Robbers' Roost The Drift Fence The Hash Knife Outfit The Code of the West Thunder Mountain The Trail Driver West of the Pecos Raiders of Spanish Peaks Knights of the Range Thirty Thousand on the Hoof Twin Sombreros Majesty's Rancho The Wilderness Trek Valley of Wild Horses Lost Pueblo Black Mesa Stranger from the Tonto The Fugitive Trail Arizona Clan Stairs of Sand The Lost Wagon Train Shadow on the Trail The Maverick Queen The Dude Ranger Wyoming Horse Heaven Hill Fighting Caravans Western Union

The stories collected here are a sample of Zane Grey's finest. The nine stories include 'The Ranger', 'The Camp Robber', 'Monty Price's Nightingale' and 'Lightning', a classic tale of a wild stallion and the wranglers who want to capture him.

By studying intersections among new cults of wealth, ritually empowered amulets and professional spirit mediumship—which have emerged together in Thailand’s dynamic religious field in recent decades—Capitalism Magic Thailand explores the conditions under which global modernity produces new varieties of enchantment. Bruno Latour’s account of modernity as a condition fractured between rationalizing ideology and hybridizing practice is expanded to explain the apparent paradox of new forms of magical ritual emerging alongside religious fundamentalism across a wide range of Asian societies. In Thailand, novel and increasingly popular varieties of ritual now form a symbolic complex in which originally distinct cults centred on Indian deities, Chinese gods and Thai religious and royal figures have merged in commercial spaces and media sites to sacralize the market and wealth production. Emerging within popular culture, this complex of cults of wealth, amulets and spirit mediumship is supported by all levels of Thai society, including those at the acme of economic and political power. New theoretical frameworks are presented in analyses that challenge the view that magic is a residue of premodernity, placing the dramatic transformations of cultic ritual centre stage in modern Thai history. It is concluded that modern enchantment arises at the confluence of three processes: neoliberal capitalism’s production of occult economies, the auraticizing effects of technologies of mass mediatization, and the performative force of ritual in religious fields where practice takes precedence over doctrine.

In the spring of 1862, there was no more important place in the western Confederacy-perhaps in all the South-than the tiny town of Corinth, Mississippi. Major General Henry W. Halleck, commander of Union forces in the Western Theater, reported to Washington that "Richmond and Corinth are now the great strategical points of war, and our success at these points should be insured at all hazards." In the same vein, Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard declared to Richmond that "If defeated at Corinth, we lose the Mississippi Valley and probably our cause." Those were odd sentiments concerning a town scarcely a decade old. By this time, however, it sat at the junction of the South's two most important rail lines and had become a major strategic locale. Despite its significance, Corinth has received comparatively little attention from Civil War historians and has been largely overshadowed by events at Shiloh, Antietam, and Perryville. Timothy Smith's panoramic and vividly detailed new look at Corinth corrects that neglect, focusing on the nearly year-long campaign that opened the way to Vicksburg and presaged the Confederacy's defeat in the West. Combining big-picture strategic and operational analysis with ground-level views, Smith covers the spring siege, the vicious attacks and counterattacks of the October battle, and the subsequent occupation. He has drawn extensively on hundreds of eyewitness accounts to capture the sights, sounds, and smells of battle and highlight the command decisions of Halleck, Beauregard, Ulysses S. Grant, Sterling Price, William S. Rosecrans, and Earl Van Dorn. This is also the first in-depth examination of Corinth following the creation of a new National Park Service center located at the site. Weaving together an immensely compelling tale that places the reader in the midst of war's maelstrom, it substantially revises and enlarges our understanding of Corinth and its crucial importance in the Civil War.