TRAVEL / United States / West / General

Documenting the very beginning of Americans’ love affair with the automobile, the pieces in this volume—the first of a planned multivolume series—offer a panorama of motoring travelers’ visions of the burgeoning West in the first decade of the twentieth century.

As a young college student in the early 1970s, Laurie Wagner had never camped out, never gone hiking, and never lived without electricity or indoor plumbing. Yet she walked away from these comforts and headed for the wildest reaches of Montana to live with a man she had not met in person.When I Came West is Laurie Wagner Buyer’s account of her terrifying and exhilarating years in Montana as she changes from a girl too squeamish to touch a dead mouse to a toughened frontierswoman unafraid to butcher a domestic animal.

The emphasis in this book is on the Union campaigns against the Confederates and the Indians who sought to take advantage of the confusion of the Civil War. Yet it is also shown that the Western Territories came of age as a result of the conflict. When the Confederate invasion had been repelled, the Union leaders undertook vigorous campaigns for extermination or settlement of the Indians on reservations. Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah all acquired their present boundaries and patterns of state government during the Civil War period.

The number and variety of forts and posts, together with changes of location, name, and designation, have posed perplexing problems for students of western history. Now Robert W. Frazer has prepared a systematic listing of all presidios and military forts, which were ever, at any time and in any sense, so designated.