La Frontera is New Publisher in Town

It's good news when Wyoming gets a new book publisher.

La Frontera Publishing has set up shop in Cheyenne -- and its first book is by a Wyomingite. La Frontera chose Encampment's Candy Moulton as its debut author with the second (and revised) edition of her 1994 book "Legacy of the Tetons: Homesteading in Jackson Hole." It will be distributed by the University of New Mexico Press and is featured in the press's spring catalog.

This new edition features a special section on "Mormon Row" and the handcart migration along the Mormon Trail. La Frontera's publisher, Mike Harris, sent me a review copy. It's a good-looking book, with a cover photo featuring one of the Mormon Row cabins with the distinctive Tetons in the background. Lots of photos are included, as is a map produced by WAC fellowship recipient Hannah Hinchman.

I know very little about this aspect of WYO history and look forward to reading the book before the next time I see Candy, which probably will be at the June 1-3 Wyoming Writers, Inc. conference in Thermopolis.

Mike and his wife plan to complete their move to WYO from southern California this summer. He has two more books in production. One, Mike says, is a fictional "family saga set during the Black Hills gold rush of 1876" and the other is "a nonfiction account of the last U.S. mining rush that took place around Death Valley in 1913" which is also "a bit of a true-life murder mystery."

Mike says he wants to let this blog's readers know that the press is looking for historical nonfiction manuscripts about Wyoming. "I have a slot open in my spring 2008 publishing schedule for a nonfiction book and I'm hoping to find something about Wyoming's Old West (about 1830s to around 1918) that would fit the bill. Our guidelines are on our the web site.... We don't accept printed manuscripts -- everything needs to be on a CD-ROM and presented in Microsoft Word or an RTF format."

Labels: humanities, publishing, Wyoming history

- posted by Michael Shay @ 10:25 AM 0 comments

 
Return of "Yellowstone Kelly"

I was eight when I saw the movie Yellowstone Kelly, with Clint Walker as the almost-forgotten frontiersman, explorer and army scout in the post-Civil War West. I don’t remember much of the plot, but Walker – who was star of the Cheyenne TV series – battled the wilderness, Indians, and an inept assistant played by Ed "Kookie" Byrnes. The big dude played Cheyenne Brodie on television, roaming the West and helping folks out of various predicaments. He was heroic, in all the ways of westerns of the fifties and early sixties.

The University of New Mexico Press has just published The Life of Yellowstone Kelly by Jerry Keenan of Longmont, Colo. The true tale is even more fantastic than the Hollywood version. Kelly was born in New York in 1848 and joined the U.S. Army at the close of the Civil War. He served in Minnesota and the Dakotas. When he left the army, he headed further West and "came to know the Upper Missouri and Yellowstone River valleys as well as any white man of his era," according to the UNM Press web site. Later, "he explored Alaska, fought in the Philippines, and served as agent at the San Carlos Apache reservation in Arizona. He then prospected in Nevada before finally retiring to the quiet life of a California orchardist."

"Jerry Keenan used Kelly's memoirs and personal correspondence, along with a variety of primary and secondary sources, to produce a comprehensive look at this remarkable man who knew many prominent figures of his era, including George Bird Grinnell, Col. Nelson A. Miles, William F. ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, and President Theodore Roosevelt."

Keenan is a writer/historian and the author of The Great Sioux Uprising, The Wagon Box Fight, Encyclopedia of American Indian Wars 1492-1890, and Encyclopedia of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars.

He’ll be signing copies of his book on Saturday, Jan. 6, 2 p.m., at the Borders Bookstore, 1101 S. Hover St., Longmont, Colo.

Labels: Western History, writers, Wyoming history

- posted by Michael Shay @ 9:01 AM 1 comments

 
MUSEUM HOSTS TALK ON GAME WARDENS: Readers who enjoy C.J. Box’s mystery novels starring game warden Joe Pickett might want to attend a presentation on “History of the Wyoming Game Warden” on Thursday, Dec. 14, 7 p.m., in the Multi-Purpose Room in the Wyoming State Museum in Cheyenne. Jay Lawson, of the Wyoming Game and Fish Dept., will discuss the appointment of the first game warden in the 1890s, as well as many other interesting events involving the state’s red-shirted G&F employees. He will examine the unsolved murder of two game wardens in the Sierra Madre Mountains and the story of Earl Durand’s killing spree following his arrest for poaching elk. Lawson also will explore the restoration of the beaver by early wardens and the evolution of equipment and techniques used by the Game and Fish Dept. The State Museum is located in the Barrett Building, 2301 Central Avenue. FMI: 307-777-7022.

Labels: writers, Wyoming history

- posted by Michael Shay @ 2:41 PM 0 comments

 
THIS DAY IN WYOLIT HISTORY: On November 21, 1940, novelist and short story writer Ernest Hemingway married war correspondent and author Martha Gellhorn in Cheyenne. Hemingway's friend, noted photographer Robert Capa, shot the ceremony for Life magazine. The Author’s Calendar web site describes the relationship this way: “The first years of their marriage were happy, although Gellhorn was never really attracted to Hemingway, or believed in romantic love. Hemingway taught her to ride, and shoot, and fish. In the afternoon they played tennis.” The couple spent most of the next five years apart, covering various World War II battles for Colliers’ magazine. They were divorced in 1945. Hemingway committed suicide in Idaho in 1961 and Gellhorn continued her life as a war correspondent, covering the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the war in Vietnam, and, when she was 81 years old, the U.S. invasion of Panama. She died in 1998.

Sources: Wyoming Almanac; http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/gellhorn.

Labels: writers, Wyoming history

- posted by Michael Shay @ 3:14 PM 0 comments