Figures in a Western Landscape

Men and Women of the Northern Rockies

Elizabeth Stevenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138523555
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351519878
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

""Figures in a Western Landscape is an absolutely stunning book. A biographer's take on the story of the American West, it posits that the turns of history are based on people-major 'figures' who shape their time and place. In her sequence of biographical essays, Elizabeth Stevenson tells the story of the northern Rockies and, in particular, Montana, a state of mind even more than it is a state of the Union. As her readers have come to expect, she offers more than a mere recounting of events. Stevenson captures the humanity of her subjects."" -Charles Little, author of Louis Bromfield at Malabar and Greenways for AmericaThe northern Rocky Mountains and adjacent high plains were the last American West. Here was the final enactment of our national drama-the last explorations, the final battles of the Indian wars, the closing of the frontier. In Figures in a Western Landscape, award-winning biographer Elizabeth Stevenson humanizes the history of the region with a procession of individual lives moving across generations. Each of the sixteen men and women depicted left behind his or her own unique written record or oral history. The stories they have bequeathed are rich in revealing anecdote and colorful detail. Among them: Meriwether Lewis, America's ""most introspective explorer,"" John Kirk Townsend, known to the Chinooks as ""the bird chief,"" Pretty-Shield, wife of the Crow scout who warned Custer to turn back at Little Big Horn, James and Granville Stuart, early settlers lured by rumors of gold in the 1850s.In a concluding chapter, Stevenson draws on previously unpublished material to reveal new information about Martha Jane Cannary Burke, better known as Calamity Jane, the woman who could ride, shoot, and drive a mule team as well as any man (but who once failed to ""pass"" because she didn't cuss her mules like one). She lies buried in Deadwood, South Dakota, next to the man some said was her husband, Wild Bill Hickok.These and other men and women whose stories Stevenson

Index

Abbott, E. C. (“Teddy Blue”), 98, 142, 156, 157–58, 167, 171

Alaska, ixn

Alderson, Nannie, 99, 100–102, 104, 106–11, 182

Alderson, Walter, 100, 102, 106–7, 108–11

Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Forth Worth, 139

Anaconda Company (Amalgamated), 116, 117, 120, 126–27, 128, 134, 141

Animals. See Wild life

Antoine, Father, 51

Audubon, John James, 29, 31, 32, 38–39, 44

Baker, Colonel Eugene M., 81, 191

Baker massacre, 81, 131, 191–92

Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 96

Banditti of the Rocky Mountains, 69

Bashkirtseff, Marie, 122–23

Bass, Rich, 185

Bates, Frederick, 13

Battle of Little Bighorn, 87, 91, 131

recollections of, 99–100

visit to site of, 187

Battle of Rosebud, 87–88

Battle of Wounded Knee, 93

Bear(s)

grizzly, 188, 193

Lewis confronts, 8

Bearpaw Battlefield, 93, 187

Beavers

den of, used as shelter, 83

disappearance of, 24

trapping of, 17

Beer, Ralph, 185

Beidler, X., 68, 69

Bell, Glenda, 171

Benetsee (Francois Findlay), 55

Bennett, Ben, 192

Bent, William, 136

Benteen, Captain Frederick W. (officer at Little Bighorn), 91

Bergon, Frank, 181

Berkeley Pit, 127

Big Hole, 190

Big Rock Candy Mountain, The (Stegner), 184

Big Sky, The (Guthrie), 183–84

Biography and history, x, 181–82

Bison. See Buffalo

Bitterroot Valley, 40, 45, 47, 56, 189

Blackfeet Indians, 12, 34, 191–92

Baker’s massacre of, 81, 131, 191–92

as feared, 18, 22, 34, 54, 131

and Owen, 49

and Charles M. Russell, 137

and Osborne Russell, 23

and Salish, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Figures in a Western Landscape
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• ONE / The Soliloquies of Meriwether Lewis
• TWO / Fur Trapper: Osborne Russell
• THREE / Naturalist: John Kirk Townsend
• FOUR / Trader and Priest: John Owen and Pierre Jean De Smet
• FIVE / Settlers: James and Granville Stuart
• SIX / Editor and Outlaw: Thomas Dimsdale and Henry Plummer
• SEVEN / Soldiers: George Crook and John Gregory Bourke
• EIGHT / Survivors: Pretty-Shield and Nannie Alderson
• NINE / Coppertown People
• TEN / Mr. Gibson and the Cowboy: Paris Gibson and Charles M. Russell
• ELEVEN / Who Was Calamity Jane? A Speculation
• TWELVE / Recollection and Renewal: An Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index