Western American History

In the cool evening of March 14, 1918, Sophia Videl and a Ms. Behrman rolled into Colorado in their automobile over the New Mexico border, on their way to Creede. The dusty roads were lonely, and the pair hoped that their late-night cruise wouldn't rouse suspicion.

British-Canadian Boundary Commission, 1873-74: The Metis Armed Escorts and Scouts, Members of the 49th Rangers:
    The Treaty of Ghent in 1814 and a subsequent agreement established the Canadian-American boundary from the northwest corner of the Lake of the Woods south to the 49th parallel, thence west for 853 miles to the Rockies. During 1873 and 1874 the Commission surveyed from Pembina to the Rocky Mountains. The British Commission employed William Hallett and 30 armed Metis guides and scouts, the subject of this monograph.

In 1846, Henry James Warre, travelling east in May and Paul Kane travelling west at the end of October and beginning of November made the first sketches of the Upper Athabasca River valley and Athabasca Pass, in what since 1909 has been Jasper National Park. Rephotography of the sites they sketched deepens historical awareness of the normal fur-trade route up the Athabasca and then the Whirlpool River valleys. The paper thus traces the nascent non-native human history of Canada's montane national parks.

This article documents the abuse and murder of a 10-year-old boy, Isaac Whitehouse, an early settler of Parowan, Utah. After the death of his parents on the overland passage to Utah in 1854, Whitehouse was placed under the care of his aunt and step-uncle, While in their custody, the boy became the victim of abuse and was murdered on October 27, 1855. The article documents the trial, conviction, and eventual pardoning of his uncle by Brigham Young. It also addresses 19th century child abuse in Utah.

Studies of exploration and travel writing in most disciplines depend heavily if not exclusively on the published version of texts. However, as a travel-based narrative evolves, sometimes, sufficient changes are introduced among the four stages of composition (because a writer other than the traveller becomes involved, the traveller alters ideas and descriptions after reflecting on the travels, or the traveller alters representations to conform with the expectations of the audience at whom a subsequent stage of the narrative is directed) to cast doubt on the reliability of the publication as the record of what the traveller experienced. The essay will focus this thesis by examining how explorers James Cook and Samuel Hearne, and artist/traveller Paul Kane, evolved into published authors.

What did it mean for Jasper National Park to come into being at the beginning of the twentieth century? The extensive introduction to a multi-authored volume provides readers with an orientation not only to the human history behind the creation of the second montane national park in Canada but also to the history of the indigenous presence on the land that the creation of the park aimed to erase in order to render its vast region a playground for eastern North Americans.