Product Description
The book may have numerous typos or missing text. It is not illustrated or indexed. However, purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original rare book from the publisher's website. You can also preview the book there.Purchasers are also entitled to a trial membership in the publisher's book club where they can select from more than a million books for free.Subtitle: An Illustrated Historical Gazetteer of Missouri, Embracing the Geography, History, Resources and Prospects... the New Constitution, the Emancipation Ordinance, and Important Facts Concerning "Free Missouri". an Original Article on Geology, Minerology, Soils, Etc. by Prof. G.c. Swallow. Also Special Articles on Climate, Grape Culture, Hemp, and TobaccoOriginal Publisher: J.B. Lippincott ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great Overall Look at Missouri State Parks
Having lived in Virginia, Tennessee, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Oklahoma, I can honestly say that Missouri has one of the best and strongest State Park Systems in the US. In fact, Missouri is a hidden gem in a nation of vacation goers who flock lemming like to Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Smokies.

Missouri is centrally located and has an outstanding highway system that gets you to all corners and to the most remote of its state parks.

This book provides a great source of photographs and text, which are enough to tease you for a visit to parks as diverse as Ha-Ha-Tonka, Washington State Park, Taum Sauk Mountain, and Babler to mention only a scant few.

Don't expect this tome to go into great detail about each of the parks. It doesn't, but the book's purpose is to relate how Missouri's State Park system evolved and then to showcase each one of them. And the book is remarkably succesful in achieving this goal. Perhaps the books most glaring shortcoming is the lack of maps, but this is a coffee table book and won't fit in most fanny packs.

It remains an oft looked at resource in my library. Many a trip began in its pages.

Grab a copy of this book, and let it guide you to some of Missouri's hidden treasures. And treasures they are. In 1978 I arrived in St. Louis, a Tennessee teen raised on Blue Ridge hiking. In my sullen anger at having been transplanted from God's country, I assumed Missouri had nothing to offer me. Some 25 years later, I continue to be pleasantly surprised by all that Missouri can offer. About the only thing Missouri can't provide are crowds...and that's a wonderful thing.

... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

A German Fairy Tale in Rural Missouri
Original version published by Paul Fessler in H-Net Book Review for H-GAGCS listserv

An academic's recommendation of a book as a "good read", however, can often be regarded as suspect by undergraduates and general readers.Perhaps our overexposure to dissertations and monographs have perverted our sense of what constitutes an enjoyable and easy to read book.To counteract such biases and perversions, I asked my wife to read Hauser's book.This book passed my wife's test. If only all books published by academic presses could boast such accessibility.

Originally published in Germany in 1950, My Farm on the Mississippi was clearly written for a non-academic audience.In this brief, very accessible book, Heinrich Hauser, an opponent of the Nazi regime and wartime German refugee, turns his three years from 1945-1948 on a Missouri farm near the German-American community of Wittenberg into an engaging adventure story.This book caught the eye of Curt Poulton, a historical geographer and translator at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who translated this work into English.Poulton argues that Hauser, as a German living among a German immigrant community in the wake of World War II, offers invaluable commentary upon this 1940s "postimmigrant America" where immigrants' native language and customs were still alive.

In 1939, Hauser, a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction, escaped from Germany with his Jewish wife and two children.After unsuccessfully trying his hand at farming in upstate New York and then at city life in Chicago, Hauser and his wife yearned for the romantic fresh air of the proverbial American heartland.With no prospects or firm destination, Hauser set off for St. Louis and points southward in an old 1928 Packard in search of his dream farm.South of St. Louis and just north of Cape Girardeau, Hauser and his wife began passing signs to "Stuttgart", "Dresden", "Altenberg", and "Wittenberg".In Cape Girardeau, Hauser spotted a "Dr. Schultz" and paid this German-speaking physician a visit to inquire about the region and the German-sounding places.Working through the German-American subculture, Hauser soon bought a farmstead south of the town of Wittenberg, Missouri on the Mississippi floodplain.

Hauser recounts how his wife Rita and son Huc struggled to make the farm a working proposition for the next three years.Most of the profits, however, were used to provide care packages and other aid to their German friends and relatives back home.During the rest of the time, his family survives horrific floods, raging forest fires, and a comic shipwreck.During the summers, his son Huc devised plans and adventures such as making a boat with an outboard motor in ways reminiscent of a Little Rascals episode.By 1948, however, low crop prices and homesickness convinced the reluctant Hausers to return to Germany and abandon their Missouri farm.

Nevertheless, Hauser offers a useful window into this German-American society on the banks of the Mississippi.As Hauser notes, it is this region's rural isolation that permitted its German culture and language to survive both World War I and World War II and beyond.Hauser knew he was among his own kind when he saw women working the fields---a practice Americans generally avoided.In the local bars, these German-Americans would add salt to modify the sweet American beers like Falstaff and Budweiser. When the war in Europe was over, Hauser's family celebrated with a crowd of itinerant German-American lumber workers playing "schottiches" and singing songs such as "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore" and sea tunes like "In Hamburg da bin ich gewesen".Also particularly interesting (and useful for immigration and ethnicity courses) are Hauser's recollected interactions between these German-Americans and the nearby African-Americans.

Just as Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America offers an outsider's critique of early nineteenth-century America, Hauser's observations present a valuable perspective of postwar America, its rural traditions and ethnic relationships.Hauser is an "outsider/insider" within the postwar German-American community. Though an outsider as a recent German refugee, he can speak the language (both linguistically and theologically).This allowed him to enter into the culture and bring a unique perspective to bear upon it.

Because this book was originally written for a German audience unfamiliar with many aspects of American society and culture, Hauser's narrative is particularly instructive to an American audience today.For many undergraduate students in particular, Hauser's emphasis on the basics of everyday American life proves more fascinating to American readers today than when it was originally published.Approaching the daily life of the post-World War II America from the cultural distance of a foreigner is in many ways similar to the approach of today's readers and students separated from that cultural landscape by the passage of fifty years.Thus, Hauser's cultural observations, which may have seemed less interesting to an American reader in the 1950s when the work was first published are met with a much different perspective.

Without Poulton's sparkling translation, however, these observations would have lost much of their power to English readers.Poulton's work arouses comparisons to other recent and notable translations such as W.C. Kuniczak's translation of Heinrich Sienkiewicz's monumental Trilogy beginning with the novel "With Fire and Sword" (popular Polish nationalist fiction written during the late 19th century-a useful assignment for courses dealing with 19th century European nationalism, by the way).Poulton remains faithful to Hauser's intent to provide his readers with an adventure story.So dependent upon narrative flow and colorful description, this value and attraction of this work would have been irreparably harmed by a poor translation.

Readers interested in this approach should also see the superb collection of immigrant letters in News from the Land of Freedom by Kamphoefner, Helbich, and Sommer (Cornell University Press, 1991). ... Read more

Product Description
Historically, it is the land of the bison. But the land across which these powerful herds once thundered has been transformed. We know it today by such names as Montana, Wyoming, Dakota, western Iowa, and Nebraska-but it is really buffalo country, the land of the big sky rivers.

This book is a tale of two rivers, a history of the majestic Missouri and how it was once wedded to the Yellowstone. Though quite different today-one dammed into reservoirs, the other unregulated with a semblance of wildness-they were once linked ecologically, geographically, and historically. Then in the twentieth century, Euro-Americans dismantled many of these connections and attempted to uncouple the streams.

Viewing the rivers and their surrounding lands as a living system, Robert Kelley Schneiders focuses on four components within the Upper Missouri bioregion-the Missouri River valley, the Yellowstone River valley, Homo sapiens, and bison-to show the significance of their interaction over the past two hundred years.

To frame his story, Schneiders goes back to the nineteenth-century journals of fur traders and settlers, and in the record of flora, fauna, floods, and human activity he finds evidence of rapid and disruptive change. Bison once had the greatest influence on the land, and Schneiders depicts an original bison and Indian trail network on which were overlaid the first forts and towns and then the railroads, highways, and reservoirs that reconfigured the region forever.

Schneiders explains how these geographical constructs interacted with larger demographic and economic trends in the twentieth-century West, as dams and their resultant reservoirs enhanced the federal presence in the Dakotas and eastern Montana. He describes human encroachment on the rivers and tells why the Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri but spared the Yellowstone. The engineers and their backers have so completely engineered the Missouri that few people today think of it as anything other than water. But we can reestablish our bonds to the river if we decide to let it flow once again, argues Schneiders. Removing the dams on the Missouri is the first step toward reasserting localism and grassroots democracy.

In what was once buffalo country, a dormant ecology awaits rebirth. A major work of environmental history, Big Sky Rivers offers a challenging vision for the future of the Upper Missouri bioregion. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

anti Euro-Americanism
The book contains a few interesting points about the Missouri and the Yellowstone rivers. Almost all of these are collected by the author from other works. Buffalo migration patterns for instance were news to me.

The rest of the book is a waste of time and paper, full of zany slams at what the author characterizes as "euro-americans". These are amusing for a short time, then tiresome.

Buy it used or nor at all.

Big Sky Rivers
The subtitle cites the Yellowstone and Upper Missouri as this book's subject matter.Upper Missouri is defined as the Missouri above its confluence with the Platte River.The book's basic precept is that the rivers set the rhythm for the region, although the author acknowledges the river's dependence on climate and weather.Before Europeans interfered on the natural systems, the bison moved in accordance to the rivers, and the humans (Native Americans) responded to the rivers and the bison.

The author appears to believe that almost everything the Europeans did constituted negative interference.Perhaps the biggest crime was damming the Missouri.However, nearly exterminating both the bison and the Native Americans was arguably worse.Plowing the land and building fences was not far behind.Include a good deal of governmental politics in the list of crimes.The book presents a great deal of research to support all these points.It is set into a holistic, ecological context.A quote from the final chapter captures the tenor of the book:"... maladjustment is most conspicuous in the present geography, which is out of sync with the Upper Missouri's ecological and hydrologic rhythms."

While I acknowledge the validity of the charges Mr. Schneiders levels against Euro-Americans, the conclusions reached are suspect.The ecological and political context is artificially constrained, almost as if the conclusions came first and drove the model that derived them.There were many factors; regrettable perhaps, but nevertheless uncontrollable; that drove Euro-American intrusion into the bison-culture of the Yellowstone and Missouri country.Factors just as powerful will keep humans from voluntarily reversing the changes they have wrought.

The author believes in removing dams and reintroducing free-roaming bison.This is in line with those who advocate the "Buffalo Commons."Admittedly, some arid land in the west is changing from farming to grazing, and in some cases bison are doing the grazing.However, to achieve Mr. Schneiders' recommended state, the cities and irrigated farmland along the rivers must virtually vanish.Human history in the United States, Europe, and around the world indicates that this is not going to happen.

This book is well-written.It contains a lot of factual history.However, unless pre-disposed to accept this book's conclusions, the reader will finish reading the book with the feeling that the time and effort spent could have been used better in other ways.The arguments presented are too weak to change many minds.
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Product Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize. Across the Wide Missouri tells the compelling story of the climax and decline of the Rocky Mountain fur trade during the 1830s. More than a history, it portrays the mountain fur trade as a way of business and a way of life, vividly illustrating how it shaped the expansion of the American West.Amazon.com Review
Like many U.S. historians, cultural critic Bernard DeVotobelieved that the American character was rooted in the experience ofwestward expansion.Unlike those who championed the civilizing gracesof the agrarian frontier, however, DeVoto drew inspiration from themercenary, imperial designs of the fur trade. Originally published in1947, Across the Wide Missouriis arguably the best known of hisstudies in American history, examining the rise and fall of theU.S. fur dynasties in the 1830s. The book chronicles the competitionbetween John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company and the Rocky MountainFur Company, an "opposition" group of trappers (including Jim Bridgerand Kit Carson) descended from the earlier entrepreneurial activitiesof General William H. Ashley. Devoto specifically narrates the majorexpeditions and the daily experiences of the Western divisions ofthese companies, which scoured the northernmost regions of the RockyMountains for beaver. He contends that, by exploring the recentlycharted Northern plateau, fighting off interlopers, and setting uptrade networks, the loose confederation of trappers, traders, andNative Americans shaped the materialism that typifies modern Americansociety.In his densely detailed description of the company"rendezvous," DeVoto shows how the activities of trading, partying,and resource pooling created a shared experience for competingcultural and economic parties on the frontier. While the centrality ofthe fur trade in the development of the American character may strikesome readers as overemphasized, DeVoto's thesis still carries muchrelevance for modern American studies.--John M. Anderson ... Read more

Customer Reviews (17)

History the way you've never read it.
I first heard of Bernard DeVoto while reading Wallace Stegner. If Stegner liked him, I thought, he must be worth reading. That turned out to be an understatement. DeVoto may be the greatest historian and man of letters this country has ever produced, and it's hard for me to believe that I came to such a ripe age before reading him. Of his great American trilogy, Across the Wide Missouri was the most enjoyable to me, simply because it tells the story of the Mountain Men, the trappers and fur traders, which I've always found interesting. He writes with the authority and panache of a great scholar, one who has researched his subject completely and relies only on first hand accounts, and transmits the knowledge he has gained as only the best of teachers can. Across the Wide Missouri is an enormous work that I will never forget, it reads like the best potboiler, and along with DeVoto's other works, has added immeasurably to my understanding of American history and my appreciation of great writers.

Densely Detailed Account Energized by a Lively, Robust Voice
Bernard De Voto's meticulously detailed account of the last days of the fur trade reveal the lives of the sometimes inspired, often desperate, original survivors, not the faux survivors we now watch on "reality" TV.Drawing largely from journals and records of the traders -- and noting spots where he doubts their credibility -- De Voto creates a compelling picture of the goings-on between the fur men and various native Plains tribes, a relationship that in many respects confounds our current understanding.It seems it was more varied and complex then we've been led to believe. Sometimes an uneasy friendship and respect prevailed, sometimes murder, but often it seemed both native peoples and fur traders were striving to exploit each other for all they could get. Most particularly he distinguishes between the tribes, their customs and proclivities. Clearly a fur trader's survival often depended on his ability to understand these differences. But De Voto's over-arching story of survival -- and, ultimately, defeat -- involves the brutal competition between the fur companies as each attempts to rule the trade. De Voto's voice is smart, robust, sometimes quite humorous. (Watch for irony.) However, coming to us from an age before the Civil Rights Movement, before the Women's Movement, the author does not share the benefits of our deeper, subtler understanding.That's the bad news.On the good side, he writes without self-censorship, uncurtailed by the obedience contemporary historians must show to the various academic conventions of our era.

Real Mountain Man Book!!!
Living in Colorado, and having hiked and driven the western part of the United States, I think this book is great. It tells the story of Mountain Men and the areas they covered. The adventures they lived, and the skill it took to survive. What legends of the West!

NEEDS WORK
I AGREE W/NAICHE. AUTHOR HAS(HAD) GOOD COMMAND OF SUBJECT MATTER BUT PRESENTS IT IN A MADDENINGLY DISORGANIZED MANNER. POORLY INTRODUCED PERSONAGES & EVENTS SEGUE THROUGH EACH CHAPTER NOT TO BE ADEQUATELY DISCUSSED (IF AT ALL) UNTIL MANY PAGES LATER. I FOUND MYSELF FLIPPING AHEAD & BACK IN FRUSTRATION TRYING TO MAINTAIN CONTINUITY. MR. DeVOTO SEEMS MORE CONCERNED WITH DEMONSTRATING HIS LITERARY WIT THAN CLEARLY PRESENTING HIS SUBJECT MATTER. I FOUND ROBERT UTLEY'S "A LIFE WILD AND PERILOUS" FAR EASIER TO READ & LEARN FROM.

Wagh!
Across the Wide Missouri

Mr. DeVoto has a passion for this subject and a passion for the characters that live in it.

Here are some excerpts from the book:

"There were few delicate feeders in the mountains...The river tribes liked the green, putrid flesh of buffalo drowned while crossing the ice and hauled ashore weeks later, `so ripe, so tender, that very little boiling is required.'They ate the kidneys raw... the white man would eat the liver raw as soon as it was taken;he seasoned it with the gall or sometimes with gunpowder...he had no more tableware than his belt knife - gravy, juices and blood running down his face, forearms and shirt.He wolfed the meat and never reached repletion.Eight pounds a day was standard ration for Hudson Bay employees [but often eat twice that amount]...melted fat was gulped by the pint.Kidney fat could be drunk without limit...Hump and boss boil in a kettle, cracked marrow bones sizzle by the fire...Camp is pitched by a small creek or a rushing mountain river...Here is the winesap air of the high places, the clear, green sky of evening fading to a dark that brings the stars within arm's length, the cottonwoods along the creek rustling in the wind.The smell of meat has brought wolves and coyotes almost to the circle of firelight.They skulk just beyond it; sometimes a spurt of flame will turn will turn their eyes to gold...Horses and mules crop the bunch grass at the end of their lariats or browse on leaves along the creek.The firelight flares and fades in the wind's rhythm on the faces of men in whose minds are the vistas and the annuls of the entire West."


If you are yearning for a dry narrative of the fur trade, this is not your book.This book gives you a feel for the land and a feel for the kinds of men involved in the fur trade.It gives you a feel for the hardships that they faced, the cutthroat business practices of the trade and how instrumental these men were to opening up the west for settlement.He does not sanitize history or historical figures.He presents the good and the bad ofboth the individual fur traders and the various Indian tribes that were most closely linked to the fur trade.

As it turns out, this is not a simple story to tell or to organize into a linear narrative.There were many different characters and crosscurrents cutting through the entire period. He weaves this story together with the sinew provided by the movements of a few of the most important mountain men:Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpatrick, Joe Meek, Bill and Milton Sublette and Kit Carson.

He runs another colorful thread through the story made of missionaries.These are clearly the most foolish, most spiteful and most disagreeable people in the narrative. Some of them are also the most well-intentioned and tragic characters in the grand story. Of the missionaries' desire to convert the Nez Perce and Flathead Indians to Christianity, he says, "[Nez Perce] were superior Indians, they made no trouble, they liked and admired white men...Their desire for instruction in the mysteries was genuine and paramount, as clean as the desire of these Christians to give them what they wanted.Both desires were simple and altogether hopeless...The Indians receiving instruction were men of the age of polished stone...They tried, bothIndians and whites.There they stood, the seekers and the bearers of truth...the sincerity of these Indians' desire for religious instruction could not be doubted."And yet this first wave of missionaries met with frustration, failure and murder.

But the primary and repeated organizational thread that runs through this story is a fascinating and completely unlikely man named William Drummond Stewart.This man won the respect and deep friendship of all the great mountain men.He was kind, generous and good humored.Captain William Drummond Stewart of the British Army "was in his thirty-seventh year.He was the brother of Sir John Archibald Stewart, eighteenth of Grandtully and sixth baronet, and was next in succession to him...He went through the Hundred days with his regiment and fought at Waterloo."He traveled the prairies and the mountains in comfort, elegance and style.He was as tough, as adventurous and as skillful as any of the mountain men. Yet there was not even a hint of royal superiority about him.

Mr. DeVoto is a magnificent writer.If you are looking for an outstanding overview of the fur trade, this is your book.He also provides fascinating notes in the appendix and an extensive bibliography for those who are interested in further reading.
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Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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Soldier, coureur de bois, gentleman, Bourgmont set out from Quebec for the Missouri River country around 1712 as a military deserter and outlaw and left it ten years later a candidate for the French nobility. Bourgmont is the first full account of his career in America. ... Read more

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Put kids on the road to discovery with the series that brings the United States to life, state by exciting state. It's all here - the history and geography, the people and culture, plus colorful photos, entertaining extras, easy recipes, and so much more. For an armchair tour of the U.S., from sea to shining sea, nothing beats these marvelous books - except maybe a tour guide! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great foundation of information
I bought this book to teach my son about the state of Missouri. It is an easy read for the grade level and has a good base of information. I would recommend this to anyone looking for an overall view of the state from history to culture, places of interest, and how the state government was founded and run today. ... Read more

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Our Readers (also known as “primers”) are modeled after the popular nineteenth-century McGuffey Readers, which were used to teach life lessons and reading skills to young children.

Judy Young, the author of

S is for Show Me: A Missouri Alphabet and

Show Me the Number: A Missouri Number Book, pays homage to her home state in the entertaining and informative

The Missouri Reader.

Using colorful illustrations and a variety of writing forms,

The Missouri Reader showcases the state’s rich heritage and natural charms, as well as its place in American history. Poems, state symbols, and riddles engage beginning readers. Prose, biographies, and short stories challenge more advanced readers.

Topics include a state pledge, early Native American culture, famous citizens, and a Reader Theater performance piece. A timeline listing major events in state history is also featured.

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Customer Reviews (1)

Great book with great photos
This is a wonderful account of this great adventure.Both the writing and the photographs are excellent. The reader is able to feel the dynamic spirit of the expedition. ... Read more

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In the first analytical study of where the American upper-class lives and vacations, Stephen R. Higley explores the ways in which upper-class residential places are created and maintained. Drawing on the "Social Register" as a main source of data, Higley examines the intersection of class, status, and geography, and demonstrates the ways in which physical proximity solidifies upper-class consciousness. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

ill-informed drivel
It is astonishing that this author is even able to hold pen to paper.The so-called universities from which he received his degrees need to have their charters yanked for bestowing anything to this moron.Where he doesnt know or cannot find facts, he makes them up.This non-sense should be categorized under "fiction."Do not waste your money buying this book.Do not waste your time reading it.I trust the National Inquirer more than this idiot. I gave this book one star because there isn't a way to give it NEGATIVE stars

A rare look beyond the doormen and up the long driveways.
"Everybody has to be somewhere," and Higley has located thesocial upper class.The use of Social Register and Zip Code data is amethodological stratagem.It eliminates much of the confusion betweeneconomic mobility and the enduring role of the social class that requires more than money for membership.If you live within a hundred miles of acity, you will want to know who those people are in the elegant downtown apartment towers with doormen, and behind the walls and fences of themansions of the suburbs and exurbs. If you don't live within a hundredmiles of a city, then how in heaven's name did you get on-line? ... Read more

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The popular Rookie Books expand their horizons - to all corners of the globe! With this series all about geography, emergent readers will take off on adventures to cities, nations, waterways, and habitats around the world…and right in their own backyards. ... Read more

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Introduces the geography, history, government, people, culture, and attractions of Missouri. ... Read more

Product Description
Publisher: Columbia, Mo., University of MissouriPublication date: 1912Subjects: Missouri -- Description and travelNotes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

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THIS EDITION IS INTENDED FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Explores the different types of sea charts and how these documents have changed over the years. Features vivid, color photographs and maps with lively captions. ... Read more