The 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 the generations. Each of the sixteen men and women depicted has left behind his or her own unique written record or oral history. They have bequeathed to us stories that are rich in revealing anecdote and colorful detail. Among them:.
Meriwether Lewis, America's "most introspective explorer," whose journals provide the first English-language record of the Northwest's rivers, mountains, and plains - and offer a memorable account of how their newness struck his imagination.
John Kirk Townsend, among the first Western explorers who sought neither personal wealth nor fame but the advancement of scientific knowledge. Known to the friendly Chinooks as "the bird chief," he lacked the artistic skills of his contemporary, Audubon, and relied instead on gathering specimens (and was more than once forced by hunger to eat them).
James and Granville Stuart, early settlers lured by rumors of gold in the 1850s, who crossed three dangerous rivers on a 150-mile trek through the wilderness because they had heard rumors of an even rarer commodity - books. (They bought five, at the "very stiff" price of five dollars apiece: a volume each of Shakespeare and Byron, a life of Napoleon, a French Bible, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.).
Pretty-Shield, wife of the Crow scout who warned Custer to turn back at Little Big Horn, who "hated no one, not even the white man," and who told her story to an astonished interpreter in the 1930s.
In a concluding chapter, Stevenson draws on previously unpublished material to reveal new information about Martha Jane Cannary Burke, better known as Calamity Jane, the woman who could ride, shoot, and drive a mule team as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) and who 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 tells all helped to shape - and were in turn shaped by - the uniquely challenging landscape of America's "last West." Their words and actions, here rediscovered, give vivid color to a climactic chapter in American history.
