As Big as the West
The Pioneer Life of Granville Stuart
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Granville Stuart (1834-1918) is a quintessential Western figure, a man whose adventures rival those of Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, or Sitting Bull, and who embodied many of the contradictions of America's westward expansion. Stuart collected guns, herded cattle, mined for gold, and killed men he thought outlaws. But he also taught himself Shoshone, French, and Spanish, denounced formal religion, married a Shoshone woman, and eventually became a United States diplomat.
In this fascinating biography, Clyde A. Milner II and Carol A. O'Connor, co-editors of the acclaimed Oxford History of the American West, trace Stuart's remarkable trajectory from his birth in Virginia, through his formative years in the agricultural settlements of Iowa and the mining camps of Gold Rush California, to his rough-and-tumble life in Montana and his rise to prominence as a public figure. Along the way, we see Granville and his brother James battling bandits and horsethieves and becoming leaders of the new Montana territory. The authors explore Granville's life as a cattleman, including his role as the leader of a vigilante force, known as "Stuart's Stranglers," responsible for several hangings in 1884, his abandonment of his half-Shoshone children after his second marriage, his government service in offices ranging from the head of the Butte Public Library to U.S. Minister to Paraguay and Uruguay, and his final years, during which he composed a memoir, Forty Years on the Frontier, still widely read for its dramatic account of the era.
Written with narrative flair and a lively awareness of current issues in Western history, As Big as the West fully illuminates the conflicting realities of the frontier, where a man could speak of wiping out "half-breeds" while fathering 11 mixed-race children, and go from vigilante to diplomat in the space of a few years.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Milner and O'Connor, two leading historians of the American West, deliver an outstanding history of Granville Stuart (1834 1918), a Gold Rush miner, Montana cattle baron and hanging-hungry vigilante as well as a master of languages, a U.S. ambassador to Paraguay and Uruguay, and the author of an intriguing autobiography, Forty Years on the Frontier. Stuart's various successes were based not only on hard work, but on the unbridled exploitation of resources and native peoples, particularly the Shoshone. Although he learned the Shoshone language and married a Shoshone woman, Stuart disavowed their 11 children after 26 years, at the time of his second marriage, to a white woman. Stuart spent his final days in reduced circumstances, the one resource he had left to peddle being his romanticized memories of the early West. He left behind a room full of diaries material that Milner and O'Connor, a husband-and-wife team and both history professors at Arkansas State, put to superb use as they probe the complexities of this archetypal Western settler. B&w illus., maps.