John Jacob Astor's dream of empire took shape as the American Fur Company. At Astor's retirement in 1834, this corporate monopoly reached westward from a depot on Mackinac ...

In the early 1800s vast fortunes were made in the international fur trade, an enterprise founded upon the effort of a few hundred trappers scattered across the American West ...

In 1857 President Buchanan quietly sent new officials to rule the Utah Territory and replace Brigham Young as the territorial governor. With no official announcement, the new ...

In the development of the American West, no two decades were so full of romance and change as the years from the California gold rush of 1849 to the completion of the first ...

It is unparalleled in history, the procession of Latter-Day Saints pushing handcarts from Iowa City and Florence (Omaha) to their promised Zion by the Great Salt Lake. Many of ...

Western history is all the richer thanks to LeRoy and Ann Hafen, who have assembled a fascinating array of diaries and memoirs of forty-niners who set out from Salt Lake City ...

The legendary mountain men—the fur traders and trappers who penetrated the Rocky Mountains and explored the Far West in the first half on the nineteenth century—formed the ...