Books in A Bison book series

Boy Life on the Prairie was first published in 1899, some eighteen years before the appearance of Hamlin Garland’s A Son of the Middle Border. The broad scope of the latter book, as B. R. McElderry, Jr., tells us in the introduction to this new edition of Boy Life, has overshadowed the “earlier and better book of reminiscence dealing specifically with Garland’s boyhood experiences on an Iowa farm from 1869 to about 1881. When he wrote Boy Life on the Prairie Garland was much closer to the subject than he was in 1917, and he had the advantage of a more restricted aim: to tell directly and specifically what it was like to grow up in northeast Iowa in the years just after the Civil War. It may safely be said that no one else has given so clear and informative an account. When one considers other accounts of boyhood in nineteenth-century America—those of Aldrich, Clemens, Warner, and Howells, for example—one is impressed with the thoroughness and precision of Garland’s book. Aside from Main-Travelled Roads, Boy Life, is probably the best single book that Garland ever wrote.”The Bison Book edition is the first in more than fifty years to reproduce in full the 1899 text. It also includes an introduction addressed “To My Young Readers” and the “Author’s Notes” which appeared in the 1926 edition published by Allyn & Bacon. The forty-seven line drawings and six full-page illustrations by E. W. Deming are reproduced from the 1899 edition. In his introduction, Dr. McElderry provides a thorough and interesting analysis of Boy Life and compares it with the sketches written in 1888 which were Garland’s first attempt at reminiscence, as well as with A Son of the Middle Border.

J. Frank Dobie, in his Guide to Life and Literature of the Old Southwest, has declared that "if all other books on trail-driving were destroyed, a reader could still get a just and authentic conception of trail men, trail work, range cattle, cow horses, and the cow country in general from The Log of a Cowboy." First published in 1903, Andy Adams' classic narrative, based on his own experiences during the days of the "long drive," continues to be used and cited by historians of the Old West as the best and most reliable account of its kind. The Bison Book edition is reproduced from the first edition, with illustrations by E. Boyd Smith.

John C. Cremony's first encounter with the Indians of the Southwest occurred in the early 1850s, when he accompanied John R. Bartlett’s boundary commission surveying the United States-Mexican border. Some ten years later, as an officer of the California Volunteers, he renewed his acquaintance, particularly with the Apaches, whom he came to know as few white Americans before him had. Cremony's account of his experiences, published in 1868, quickly became, and remains today, a basic source on Apache beliefs, tribal life, and fighting tactics. Although its original purpose was to induce more effective military suppression of the Apaches, it has all the fast-paced action and excitement of a novel and the authenticity of an ethnographic and historical document.

"A chance to see the world! My mother's good red blood was in my veins, and if she could be a guiding light in a homestead on the prairies, I could be the same in a native village." That was May Wynne's immediate reaction to the chance to teach in a remote Eskimo village in Alaska. The year was 1916, and May, the daughter of a pioneer Kansas family, was two years out of teachers' college and ready for adventure. Life in Alaska is an engaging addition to the literature of women settlers in the Far North, and a rare description of daily life in a place and time—the Kuskokwim River region in early territorial days—not so well known to readers as the Yukon and camps of the gold rush era. May Wynne was the only schoolteacher in the village of Akiak, on the Kuskokwim. Her account provides a picture of government educational policy in practice and of Eskimo life at a time of transition. Besides teaching the Eskimo children, she distributed supplies for men in charge of government reindeer herds, grew a demonstration vegetable garden, and maintained a first aid station. She learned much from the Eskimos, even how to make fish nets, and observed their mingling with a community of miners, traders, and herders across the river. May Wynne's story is a romance in the fullest sense of that word, for while she was in Alaska she married Frank Lamb, a young doctor sent by the U.S. government to open a hospital in Akiak. The tragedy that occurred a year after their marriage hastened her return to the States.

Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks out his fortune—in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running through the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest. Stegner portrays more than thirty years in the life of the Mason family in this masterful, harrwoing saga of people trying to survive during the lean years of the early twentieth century.

These collected myths of Indian tribes in California and the Southwest were first published in 1912 and are introduced in this Bison Book edition by Peter Iverson. Here are the Zuni, Pima, Paiute, Shastika, and Miwok stories of the creation of the universe, animals, and humans. They tell of good and evil, the entrance of death into the world, great floods and fire, and the origins of names. Also included are fables, rain songs, the Paiute song of the Ghost Dance, and legends of Yosemite Valley.We find here the Zuni legends of Corn Maidens and the Navajo tale of the boy who became a god. Coyote in his guises as trickster, benefactor, and dupe appears prominently in the myths of the Achomawis, Gallinomeros, Miwoks, Nishinams, Pimas, Ashochimis, Karoks, Paiutes, and Sias (Zia Pueblos). Here, too, are such creators and destroyers as Old Mole, Spider, Snake, Measuring Worm, Raven, and Macaw, and a host of anthropomorphized animals and natural forces.

Long regarded as Mary Wollstonecraft's most delightful work, this series of twenty-five letters is quite possibly the perfect fusion of their famous author's personal and intellectual selves. The letters were written to her lover, Gilbert Imlay, who had sent her to the Scan-dinavian countries as his business envoy dur-ing the summer of 1795. She was accompanied by her year-old daughter and a nursemaid on part of the journey, but frequently took side trips on her own. Informed by a wealth of ideas and years of wide reading, the letters combine landscape description, sociological observation, poetic reverie, and personal apostrophe. Never ceasing to observe the members of her own sex, Wollstonecraft is concerned with the plight of Scandinavian women, and expresses her views on child care. The modern reader will be struck by the contemporaneity of her comments on prison reform, capital punishment, property, and government. This first modern edition of the Letters has been lightly edited, increasing its readability while preserving the flavor of the original. It includes the author's original notes, editorial notes, an introduction, and a selected bibliography, as well as a map of the journey.