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Read the West Book Club: Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman

Celebrate the Museum’s Annual Chuck Wagon Festival by learning about the inventor of the original chuck wagon — Charlie Goodnight. Discover the exciting story of a Texas Ranger, adventurer and immigration officer who became a symbol of his age while gambling with death in the wild frontier regions of Texas, Arizona and Old and New …

Read the West Book Club: Braiding Sweetgrass

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer draws on her experience as botanist, Native American and mother. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer holds to the idea that we have much to learn from plants and animals about living in reciprocal relationship with the world around us. Through a braid of memoir, scientific …

Read the West Book Club: Yellow Bird

When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. In her absence, the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, her tribal government swayed by corporate interests and her community burdened by a surge in violence and addiction. When …

Read the West Book Club: Rise of Wolf 8

Yellowstone National Park was once home to an abundance of wild wolves — but park rangers killed the last of their kind in the 1920s. Decades later, the rangers brought them back, with the first wolves arriving from Canada in 1995. This is the incredible true story of one of those wolves. Wolf 8 struggles …

Read the West Book Club: Empire of Shadows

In a radical reinterpretation of the 19th century West, George Black casts Yellowstone's creation as the culmination of three interwoven strands of history — the passion for exploration, the violence of the Indian Wars and the "civilizing" of the frontier. It charts a course through the lives of those who sought to lay bare its …

Read the West Book Club: Divided Spirits Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production

In recent years, as consumers increasingly demand to connect with the people and places that produce their food, the concept of terroir—the taste of place—has become more and more prominent. Divided Spirits author Sarah Bowen shows how the institutions that are supposed to guard “the legacy of all Mexicans” often fail those who are most …

Read the West Book Club: When Outlaws Wore Badges

At times, the black-hatted “villains” and white-hatted “good guys” of the Old West were one and the same. Often it was difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish who was who. Sheriff Wyatt Earp stole horses and ran brothels. Justice Hoodoo Brown and Deputy JJ Webb ruled Las Vegas as leaders of the Dodge City Gang …

Read the West Book Club: Chief Seattle and the Town That Took His Name

When the British, Spanish and then Americans arrived in the Pacific Northwest, it may have appeared to them as an untamed wilderness. In fact, it was a fully settled and populated land. Chief Seattle was a powerful representative from this very ancient world who had gained power and prominence on Puget Sound as a war …

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Read the West Book Club: Nothing Daunted

Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood attended grade school and Smith College together, spent nine months on a grand tour of Europe in 1910 and then, bored with society luncheons and chaperoned balls and not yet ready for marriage, they went off to teach the children of homesteaders in a remote schoolhouse on the Western slope …

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Read the West Book Club: Killers of the Flower Moon

Back by popular demand; read before seeing the movie! From #1 New York Times best-selling author David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon is a twisting, haunting, true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history. In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the …

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