Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
2006
Abstract
The transformation of the area along the Bozeman Trail through Wyoming and Montana in the 1860s provides a key to understanding the larger forces at work reshaping the American West in the late nineteenth century. The complex dynamics at work within the Native American cultures in the area and between them and the intruders hold a great potential for substantive historical inquiry. The present volume is a broad collection, a miscellany, of historical documents, personal reminiscences, and oral histories, as well as observations by professional historians; it even contains some fictional narratives drawing on the events at hand. Not surprisingly, mixing factual accounts with fictional speculation, mingling important and evocative historic photographs with colorful posed photos of modern "models," and lacking a clear organization, the collection often seems to go everywhere and nowhere. The material seldom strays far from armed conflict, and the editor and contributors avoid approaching the subject with conceptual sophistication. One of the contributing historians, Susan Badger Doyle, does, however, touch on the illumination an imperial framework can provide in understanding the trail.
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 26:3 (Summer 2006). Copyright © 2006 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.