Book Description
Award-winning author Paul Goble examines the construction, art, and significance of the tipi to the Plains Indians in his newest book, entitled Tipi: Home of the Nomadic Buffalo Hunters. Through a re-telling of the old-timer's stories, Goble shows how the tipi was more than just a home, but an expression of spiritual beliefs.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent and Comprehensive, a must own!.......2007-09-03
Filled with insights and great respect for this horse culture. I passed a copy on to a friend of Mongolian descent who took it to Mongolia where it was received with great interest and reverence. The artwork and symbolism should be tremendously helpful to future generations of young tribal members and descendants as the memories fade ever further.
A vivid, outstanding survey of the spiritual and culture meaning of the Native American structure........2007-06-09
Paul Goble's TIPI: HOME OF THE NOMADIC BUFFALO HUNTERS blends traditional insights into tipi construction and development with a retelling of old-timers stories and a blending in of art to make for a fine survey of construction techniques, decorations, cultural meaning, and more. TIPI includes over a hundred color illustrations and drawings and makes for a vivid, outstanding survey of the spiritual and culture meaning of the Native American structure.
Book Description
In 1867 the total number of buffaloes in the trans-Missouri region was conservatively estimated at fifteen million. By the end of the 1880s that figure had dwindled to a few hundred. The destruction of the great herds is the theme of this book. Mari Sandoz's canvas is vast, but it is charged with color and excitement-accounts of Indian ambushes, hairbreadth escapes, gambling and gunfights, military expeditions, famous frontier characters (Wild Bill Hickok, Lonesome Charlie Reynolds, Buffalo Bill, Sheridan, Custer, and Indian Chiefs Whistler, Yellow Wolf, Spotted Tail, and Sitting Bull).
Customer Reviews:
Densely packed with a LOT of information, slow going, worth owning.......2006-07-21
I found pretty much everything a person could want about the history of Buffalo hunting in America in this book- except the author information quoted by others. I'm sure they're right about Mrs. Sandoz but I didn't find anything about her.
Her style was to write sort of as an anonymous eyewitness of those past events that occurred decades before her birth.
Some of it I've read before in other books (the Adobe Walls Indian battle is described here in great detail, just a little differently than other versions)but most of her sources listed in the bibliography you'll have a hard time finding (1890's to about 1951). Facts, figures, it's pretty much all here but very slow going.
Some Unforgettable Tales.......2004-08-30
The Buffalo Hunters is interesting enough to keep the reader engaged from beginning to end, though it does tend to get bogged down with excessive minutiae in some parts, as if the author could have used a good editor to rearrange some of the material and maybe delete some of the extraneous detail. Mari Sandoz was an authority on the white settlement of the Great Plains. As miners, farmers and other frontier types would visit her father, young Mari would listen to their stories of the olden days. Much of the material in this book is no doubt taken from those stories. In some cases they were actual eyewitness accounts, in others a story was told as passed on from another in the ancient tradition of oral history. The oral stories are of course supplemented and supported by academic research, making this book a valuable primary source of information about the Old West.
Some of these tales are unforgettable: like the washtub man, an unfortunate greenhorn who got caught in a ferocious blizzard. His rescuers found him unconscious. They took him to a doctor who promptly amputated both arms and both legs due to extreme frostbite. And the story of how Wild Bill Hickok was almost killed by a band of renegade Indians until an Indian chief came to his rescue at the last minute, ordering the would-be killers to let him go. Some years later Hickok murdered this chief for no apparent reason when the chief rode into Hickok's camp one morning for coffee.
Sandoz describes the slaughter of the buffalo in vivid detail to the point that it's almost painful to continue reading. The hunters would set fifty caliber rifles on bipods and start killing by the dozens until the barrels almost melted down. It is estimated that over fifty million buffalo roamed the Great Plains before the Civil War. By 1884 there were only a few hundred left. Just like the beaver in the early nineteenth century, the buffalo were hunted practically to extinction solely for their hides, which made huge profits for the hunters and railroads. Buffalo hides were the gold of the Great Plains. There was also a market for buffalo bones that were shipped back east to make fertilizer. The life and culture of the Plains Indians depended almost totally on the buffalo. The U.S. Army's ultimate conquest of the Plains Indians was, to a great degree, the result of the loss of the Indians' main food supply. The Indians were as much starved into submission as beaten into it by force of arms.
The life of Mari Sandoz is an interesting story in itself. Born in western Nebraska in 1896 to Swiss immigrant parents, she suffered through a harsh and cruel childhood receiving only an eighth-grade education by age seventeen, and speaking only German until adolescence. She married at eighteen and divorced five years later, the marriage apparently a loveless one. She moved to Lincoln, Nebraska where she worked at low-paying jobs while attending classes at the University of Nebraska. She could never officially enroll at the university because she never completed high school, so she was never able to earn a college degree. Her one love was reading and writing, and it was in the early Lincoln years that she taught herself the skills and technique of writing. By the time of her death from cancer in 1966 she had written twenty books and many short stories.
For every Babe Ruth there are hundreds who toil away in the minors never making it to the big leagues. Likewise for writers, for every Hemingway or Steinbeck there are many who grind out book after book but never achieve great notoriety. They are regarded as local or regional writers. Mari Sandoz devoted her entire life to the art of writing about the American West in a truthful and honest way, using the language and syntax of one who grew up in the West. She was ahead of her time; she told the history of the West from both a white and Indian perspective, without any white bias, before it became fashionably chic to do so.
History at its finest.......2004-03-12
This is quite simply one of the very best history books that I have ever read. It is detailed without being wordy, exceptionally well written, and paints a vivid picture of what is was like to make a living following the great herds. If you want to read one book about the buffalo hunters, this is it.
Incredibly detailed painting of a little understood period........1998-06-27
I really enjoyed the book . Sandoz has taken a lot of scattered tales and woven them into a captivating tale, without only giving one side of the story. She tells all of the reasons that the buffalo slaughter occured and the ripple effects that happened from there. I am going to be looking up more of her many books thank you Mari
Average customer rating:
- The Mosher Genes Have Flowered
- Wonderful first novel, wonderful novel period!
- Jake Mosher is a 5 star writer!
- This book left me wondering only how it got published.
- Montana comes alive
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The Last Buffalo Hunter: A Novel
Jake Mosher
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 General
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ASIN: B0001PBY5E |
Customer Reviews:
The Mosher Genes Have Flowered.......2002-04-06
I absolutely loved this book.
The son of the renowned raconteur of the Northeast Kingdom, Howard Mosher and his wife Phyllis, first time novelist Jake Mosher has planted his boot heels high in the wilds of Mantana and stomped himself a foothold. The Last Buffalo Hunter tells the sory of 14 year-old Kyle Richards and his wild and wooly coming of age during a summer spent with his proud and profane grandfather, Cole, in the Big Sky country of Montana. Cole is a rugged logger and former broncobuster, as quick to throw a punch, as he is to pull a gun. Womanizing, whiskey drinking, Kyle's grandpa is a profane throwback to an era that has all but faded away, but ruggedly holds on like the last traces of ice along a high mountain trail in summer.
A wonderful cast of characters ramble through the book, including a cute young Indian girl who has cast her eye on a bewildered Kyle. Hucksters, dudes, unreformed Indians, and a barroom of hard drinking, hard loving men and women, hoisting shots together in drunken, fight filled nights. In the background lurks the long running fued with millionaire developer Bruce Tipton and his herd of buffalo that surround Cole Richards home. Encroaching daily, smothering him, and his stubborn view of what's really right and wrong, building to a showdown that seems as inevitable as so-called progress and development.
A journal Kyle finds of his great-grandfather's arduous journey from Kansas City to Montana in 1862 flows like a winding mountain stream through this book occasionally. The dusty journal brings to life the terrible ordeal of moving west, and gives this marvelous book a mystical quality at times. A mystical quality as ominous as the howling of the ghostly black wolf that seems to know every step Kyle takes high in the mountains at night, and the yellow hate-filled stare of the fenced-in buffallo bull, Splinter Horn. Jake Mosher wites about the West, it's history, it's people, and it's scenery with a skill well beyond his young years. The Mosher genes are truly flowering.
As I reluctantly turned the last page of this book, I sighed contentedly, but sad that it was over. I had been in the hands of a master stryteller, a craftsman of words. I knew that Kyle's summer in Montan would remain fondly in my memory as much as it would by the young grandson of Cole Richards.
Wonderful first novel, wonderful novel period!.......2001-09-11
The Last Buffalo Hunter is the first book I've read in many, many years that is set in a "real" Montana. There isn't any of the glossed-over Hollywood imagery that so often accompanies anything to do with Montana these days. This novel is about the raw, hard sides of life not just in the west but everywhere else. It's sharp, compelling, and through a set of well-developed, unique characters tells a gripping story of love, loss, adventure and understanding. It weaves legend into contemporary life, using touches of magic realism without becoming a fantasy. It left me feeling haunted and at the same time satisfied. There is no doubt that The Last Buffalo Hunter is a remarkable accomplishment, more so because it is the writer's first novel. I am anxiously awaiting a second book from Jake Mosher and a third, fourth, fifth, ect. This is one read you won't regret!
Jake Mosher is a 5 star writer!.......2001-09-02
Jake Mosher is the best young fiction writer in the country. He will go far with his writing.
This book left me wondering only how it got published........2001-07-24
Trust me. I'm being kind with the 3 Star review.
This is a book that began strong. The writing is vivid. The characters are familiar and, and the setting is seductive. For the first 50 to 100 pages, I thought I was going to thoroughly enjoy this story (hence the third star), but that was before I realized that the author had no idea where it was going.
To say that the main characters in this book are cliché gives new meaning and intensity to the word cliché. The characters quickly degenerated from being interesting to being ridiculous.
A 14 year old boy is sent by his otherwise responsible parents by bus from their home in upstate New York to visit his Grandfather in Montana for the summer. If you've ever had a 14 year old boy you know that this in itself is suspect. He reaches Montana and is finally met by his Grandfather WHO IS John Wayne in the role of Rooster Cockburn. Following in the footsteps of all good Grandpas, Cole (Rooster) teaches the boy to fly fish the local rivers, drink beer and whisky, have sex with the Indians, and shoot at the local police when they come to arrest him for the destruction of another man's property. No kidding.
To his credit as a Grandpa, Cole/Rooster also passes on a bit of family history to the boy (which he never saw fit to share with his own son for no good reason, in the form of a leather-bound diary, written by the boy's Great Great Grandfather. The diary was written as this pioneer made his way West, alone, during the 1860s to settle in Montana. This character is both cliché and not believable. He IS Robert Redford in the role of Jeremiah Johnson ("Liver Eatin' Johnston), complete with the character of Bear Claw Chris Lapp, who saves him before he dies from exposure. He later becomes Kevin Kostner in the role of "Dances With Wolves", complete with his tribal bride and the Medicine Man who predicts the extermination of the Indian people by the oncoming hordes of whites. I kid you not. But this character is also not believable because even as he is dying of exhaustion, sunburn, and starvation and is brought down to such a condition that travel means pulling himself across the prairie by his fingertips, he stops to write in his journal with the proficiency of a literary master. GIMME A BREAK! Even his horse had died of thirst at this point.
This book is chock full of good Indians who have been abused by the evil white man and of course most of these Indians have incredible mystical powers. What else? Heck, I was engaged to an Apache girl for years and if she had any mystical powers she surely never let me see them. I guess she was the exception to that rule.
The book was complete with the old western scene of the cowboy who dies, gets up and dies again, and then does it again and again ad nauseum too. At one point, Grandpa Cole, who fis always near death from having inhaled too much coal dust in his younger years, rips the oxygen tubes out of his nose while he is dying in the hospital, is carried out of the hospital so that he can man a canoe and shoot the most dangerous rapids in Montana and he dies in the canoe with his head under water, only to resurface at the end of the ride strong of body and of voice, and immediately go jogging through the woods!
But it was the last few pages of the book that really took the cake. At this point, Grandpa Rooster Cockburn Cole grabs an old Sharps rifle and heads on to a neighbor's property intent upon killing the neighbor's entire herd of bison, which he does. The last Bison left standing is ol' Splinter Horn, the biggest, meanest bull this side o' Hell. The bull charges, Cole squeezes the trigger on the Sharps, the old rifle, which had belonged to his "Dances with Wolves" Grandfather, explodes in his hands, sending the bullet into the bison. But before the Bison dies, Cole/Rooster is transformed into, of ALL literary characters, Captain Ahab, as he rides off into the woods on Splinter Horn / Moby Dick's horns, never to be seen again.
Again, three stars is generous. Bear in mind that I did not deduct points for one of the worst editing jobs I have ever encountered in a published book. The book is full of typos, like the one on page 202, 6th line down: "...and handed my his razor,..." and the one on page 235, 23rd line down: "...to shot dozens of imaginary arrows at me". At the end, the publisher tells us about the fancy type setting job he did for the book, which led me to wonder if he was too busy setting type to have someone check the book for annoying typographical errors.
If you want to read a much better book of this type, check out Vardis Fischer's "Mountain Man".
Sorry, but if this book will teach its reader anything it is that you too can get a novel published.
Montana comes alive.......2001-05-24
I found this book to be very visual and exciting! The first time meeting Cole, the grandfather is a funny and exciting scene; you are almost in the truck riding the bumpy ride with them. The scene seems disturbing, yet intriguing at the same time; then you find out the truth-which I cannot give away here- and you have to laugh out loud with relief and amusement at yourself for being disturbed! I have been to Montana just once, and every scenic word takes me back again. I have been some of the places Kyle is going-the continental divide- and I wish to go where I have not been such as the wonderful rivers described. I wonder if I may have even seen the house the Grandfather lives in. I must caution readers though: If you do not have a wonderful sense of humor which will allow you to laugh out loud, do not wish to meet a man alive with a love for the wild outdoors, do not wish to learn in a most enjoyable manner you won't even realize how much knowledge you gained until you find yourself describing elk to others, do not wish to be young again, then this is not the book for you. If you wish to see Montana without the ride on the Greyhound, to learn things you didn't know or might not have noticed, then this book will suit you well. I wonder if maybe this book isn't about the author, Jake Mosher? The only thing I know is that I look forward to his next book and as far as this one, I know I am reading it very slowly-and perhaps many times- for I want to savor every bit, and stay in Montana as long as I can!
Customer Reviews:
One of the Best Reprints of Buffalo Bill's Autobiography.......2007-06-22
Like several other biographies of this legendary Plainsman, Scout, Buffalo Hunter and Indian Fighter of the American Frontier, this book is comprised mostly of a reprint of William F. Cody's own Autobiography. What makes it a better source than many of the other reprints of Buffalo Bill Cody's fascinating 1879 acount of his early life and adventures until he reached the age of thirty-four, this volume includes an excellent foreword by another noted author and historian of the Wild West, Don Russell. His foreword makes this first complete reprinting of the original autobiography much more understandable and provides additional valuable insights into the man who coined the term "Wild West." Buffalo BIll was, without any doubt, what we often refer to as "The Real McCoy." While Cody could spin a good tale too, he was modest and humble about his own adventures. Later historians have mostly authenticated, with only minor corrections, his scary-thrilling, matter-of-fact and plain spoken recollections of his life and adventures.This is a very good read and hard to put down until the very end of the book.
An Authentic Voice.......2004-04-19
Autobiographies are at the same time the best and the worst sources of life stories. You get the authentic voice, but that voice tells you only what it wants you to believe. Both these characteristics are particularly strong here because Cody's voice is such a distinctive one and because of his status as a supreme self-promoter. So this book will not give you the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it will give you a real insight into the mind of a man who in many ways epitomizes the culture of the historic American West. Some of it may shock you; Cody describes how he shot a mule who had annoyed him by running away, and boasts of how he scalped his fallen enemies. Hardly the stuff of popular myth. If you want to know how the west was really won, then reading this book (some of it 'between the lines') will tell you much.
You can almost smell the buffalo cooking in the camp........1998-07-15
The Wild West was an even more heroic epoch than is commonly understood. While Buffalo Bill became a self-promoter, basic facts are clear: he was a superior plains guide and scout and Indian fighter. He really was the master hunter of buffalo from horseback. He was a Pony Express rider, with all that entailed. He was friends with Wild Bill, Custer, and other notables. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery on the battlefield (though sadly it was removed many years later because of a bureaucratic technicality of how he had been employed by the Army, not because of any change in the evaluation of the heroic deeds.
A most fascinating book. It gives one a different perspective to hear it from a participant.END
Average customer rating:
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The Buffalo Hunter (Gunsmoke Western)
Zane Grey
Manufacturer: Gunsmoke Westerns
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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| Westerns
| Genre Fiction
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ASIN: 0754081354 |
Average customer rating:
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When Alice Lay Down with Peter
Manufacturer: Random House
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0676973167 |
Book Description
When Alice Lay Down with Peter is a sweeping, magical novel that follows four generations of the McCormack family through more than a century of Canadian history, as it unfolds on the flood plains of southern Manitoba. The story of Alice and Peter McCormack and their progeny is a glorious, witty, and intimate epic that truly reminds us that life stories not only include the details of the past, but also expand into the present and future, encompassing much more than the statistics of life and death would seem to admit. Narrated by Blondie McCormack -- Alice and Peter’s daughter, who has just died at the age of 109 --
When Alice Lay Down with Peter is a novel that rejoices in the inevitability of change, and in the hauntings that reward our choosing to remember our own history.
Blondie’s narrative begins before her own life does, in the late 1860s, when Alice falls in love with Peter in the Orkneys, just before he sails for a new life in the New World. Disguising herself as a man, Alice follows his route and joins the Métis buffalo hunt in southern Manitoba, where she finds both Peter and the life experience she needs. But the expansion of Canada has wrought havoc on the buffalo population, and the Métis have had their work and their land cut out from under them. A way of life is dying, just as Alice and Peter are beginning their life together.
When Alice lays down with Peter, the ground shakes, the sky opens up, and lightning strikes the lovers, wrapped around each other under the open sky. At that moment, they both know that Alice has become pregnant with their child. But Alice continues her disguise, and joins Peter in fighting alongside Louis Riel and the Métis, against efforts to bring the west into the Dominion. She even participates in the political execution of Riel’s foe Thomas Scott, and is haunted by his ghost for the rest of her days. But as their baby comes closer to term, Alice and Peter realize the need to create a home, and it is on their new property near St. Norbert that Blondie, our narrator, is born.
On this piece of land, the story of Alice and Peter continues, and repeats itself through the coming generations. Blondie grows into a young woman and falls in love with Eli, a young buffalo hunter who eventually is forced to leave her when changes to his life and land become too heavy a weight to bear. Unlike her mother, Blondie reacts against her pain by going into seclusion, and studying only topics foreign to her surroundings. But when Eli returns, Blondie escapes her self-imposed isolation to take part in the Boer War, dressed as a young soldier. It is only on her return that they truly find each other again, and their lightning-fused reunion brings about the conception of their daughter, Helen.
And in that remarkable way that every generation can be seen as an exercise in repetition with variation, the McCormack women continue to find their own ways in the world and find, out there, the means of rejoining their family’s story. The too-beautiful Helen marries rich, but escapes her husband to live as a tramp on the rails and ends up fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Helen’s daughter Dianna trains as a lawyer, but gives it up to pour her passion and rebellion into botanical illustration and political protest. Each woman follows a very different path away from the family, but finds that the forces connecting them to home are too strong for any outside events to break.
Just as W
hen Alice Lay Down with Peter is a story of a family, it is a story of a particular place over time. Margaret Sweatman’s characters are never separate from the story of the land itself, or from the natural and political events that work away at its edges. The history of the McCormacks is a history of life on the land: of bountiful crops and devastating floods, the renewal of spring and the death that marks each fall. It is in the connection between the place and its inhabitants that we find the deceptively simple meaning of “home.” And it is to this conjoining of histories that Sweatman brings the lightning spark of her imagination, and out of which this wonderful novel has been born.
Average customer rating:
- The buffalo
- Concise history of the buffalo
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The Buffalo: The Story of American Bison and Their Hunters from Prehistoric Times to the Present
Francis Haines
Manufacturer: Univ of Oklahoma Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0806127813 |
Customer Reviews:
The buffalo.......2006-10-24
Here's an excellent history of the buffalo on the North American continent, from its pre-historic migratory days (it roamed as far east as Virginia and the Carolinas) to the more recent efforts by conservationists to re-establish the herds in the Dakotas, Montana, and Canada. In short and well-focused chapters, Haines recounts the relationship between the buffalo and the Native Americans, especially the Plains Indians, who relied so much on the animal for food, shelter, and clothing. Haines explains how the Indians hunted the buffalo (methods included a circling concept where isolated animals were ganged up on by numerous members of the tribe at once and, of course, the buffalo jump, where animals were herded off steep precipices in droves to their deaths); he also shows how they prepared just about every part of the animal for either food or clothing. The overwhelmingly destructive forces of whites are also portrayed, especially where the railroads encroached on the land and towns were established. A few chapters wander off the subject a bit as Haines attempts to give a history of major western concerns - the chapters on the Santa Fe Trail, the Mountain Men, and the Oregon/California Trails have little to do with the buffalo. But all in all, this is an excellent, informative history of the buffalo and its role on the American scene. Recommended.
Concise history of the buffalo.......1999-08-29
This book provides us with a fascinating history of the rise, fall and re-emergence of the great buffalo. A must for history buffs.
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Tipis, Tepees, Teepees
All Our Relatives: Traditional Native American Thoughts about Nature
The Tipi: Traditional Native American Shelter
Identity by Design: Tradition, Change, and Celebration in Native Women's Dresses
Tipi: A Modern How-To Guide
