Author:
Brands, H. W. author.
Edition Statement:First edition.
ImprintNew York : Basic Books, 2019.
Descriptionxvi, 524 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Note:Part I: Napoleon's gift. The river at the heart of America -- The corps of discovery -- West by northwest -- To the pacific -- Part II: A skin for a skin. Astoria -- Comcomly's dismay -- The white-headed eagle -- Mountain man -- Colter's run -- Ursus horribilis -- Part III: Gone to Texas. Moses Austin's dying wish -- Texas will be lost -- Ruin and redemption -- Victory or death -- Bloody palm Sunday -- Laying there yet -- Part IV: The great migration. The four wise men -- Females wanted -- Trapped out -- Waiilatpu -- For God and country -- The way west -- The business of the trail -- Desperate fury -- Ambassador from Oregon -- Part V: The world in a nugget of gold. The secret of the Sierra Nevada -- Gold mountain -- Crime and punishment -- The spirit of '87 -- To be decently poor -- Where can we do? -- Part VI: Steel rails and sharps rifles. Stephen Douglas's brainstorm -- North, south, west -- Free soil -- Hell on wheels -- Saints and sinners -- Once we were happy -- There would be no soldiers left -- Adobe walls -- Lost river -- THe pride of young Joseph -- Part VII: The middle border. Abilene -- Hard lesson -- Into the great unknown -- The arid region -- More life us -- It grew very cold -- Less corn and more hell -- Bonanza -- Part VIII: The cowboy in the White House. Rough riding -- West takes east -- Cashing in -- John Muir's last stand -- The long, long trail.
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Note:By the time he became president in 1801, Thomas Jefferson had been looking west for decades. He saw the country's population expanding and judged that America must expand too, lest the new nation become as crowded and conflict-prone as Europe. When Napoleon, to Jefferson's surprise, offered to sell French Louisiana to the United States, Jefferson leaped at the offer and launched America on a fateful and fraught journey west. In Dreams of El Dorado, H.W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West, from Lewis and Clark's expedition in the early nineteenth century to the closing of the frontier by the early twentieth. He introduces us to explorers, mountain men, cowboys, missionaries, and soldiers, taking us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading campaign in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. Throughout, brands explores the contradictions of the West and explodes its longstanding myths. The West has been celebrated as the proving ground of American individualism; in reality, the West depended on collective action and federal largesse more than any other region. The West brought out the finest and the basest in those who ventured there, evoking both selfless heroism and unspeakable violence. Visions of great wealth drew generations of Americans westward, but El Dorado was never more elusive than in the West. --Dust jacket.
