If you are looking for a comprehensive and accurate history (1847-1896) of the Mormons this book is the one to buy. David Bigler's ability to accurately research and write about Mormon history is second to none. From the discovery of gold at John Sutter and James Marshall's lumber mill to the Mountain Meadows Massacre this book covers some of the most important events in the history of the United States.

Westerners International gave David L. Bigler's Forgotten Kingdom its Best Book award for 1998.

Will Bagley, Series Editor

Bigler accomplishes what he set out to do. He has created an integrated picture of the "State of Deseret," a frontier government ruled by God through Brigham Young. Other books have treated various aspects of 19th Century Utah from the time of the arrival of the Mormons in 1847 until statehood in 1896. Bigler goes a step further and brings together these many historical threads into a well-crafted product. It gives the reader an excellent feel for life in Utah during its tumultuous first 50 years.

This book is good for integrating reading and math. There are five cases of alliteration and two anachronisms. Plus, on the middle pages there is something missing from one of the pictures! Very engaging and kids love it!

This book is an excellent math fraction introduction for children. Since it does not label itself as a "math" book, it is inviting for both parents and children. The concepts are solid, instructive and presented in a manner that involves children in the story. As a corporate executive, I have elected to provide copies for the children of my employees. Children need more examples like this book for story based learning. Excellent book!

This book is so much fun to read aloud to kids and grandkids! I've read it aloud many times to my grandchild and never gotten tired of it yet!

From Hell To Jackson Hole: A Poetic History Of The American West is a memorable book of original poems cherishing the history and spirit of the American West. Color photographs of artworks celebrating the Old West are occasionally interspersed among the moving, free-verse narratives that give life and memory to an era. Adah Isaacs Menken: Toast of San Francisco, she wowed the West/playing Mazeppa, the Cossack prince lashed/birthday naked to a wild stallion's back/in punishment for some illicit love./She filled the stage with frenzies of the flesh.//Many men damned her; most fell at her feet/and gave her gold or shares of mining stock.//Once, in Virginia City, Mark Twain came/to call at her hotel. She sipped champagne/and fed her lap dog brandied sugar cubes./He spoke in riddles of her pretty hands.

This is the book that John Mark Eberhart in his Kansas City Star review calls "one of the most illuminating histories of the American West you'll ever read" and one in which Michael L. Johnson "has taken what many consider to be a humble subgenre of American verse--so-called 'cowboy poetry'--and turned it into literature of the highest order." He's right as Roy Rogers riding on the white-hat side of law and order!

I keep this book out where I can get at it during the day so I can read a page here and there. It's filled with poems both long and short (e.g. Haiku).

The most treasured thing about this book is the appendix which lists sources. I can thus read further about the intriguing characters which are the subjects of the poems.

My ten year old son is a rapidly developing avid reader who has fallen absolutely in love with this excellent series. Erickson creates rapid narratives filled with honest (and yes, corny) humor and pleasently comic action and an occasional moral or two.

This series provides young readers with a simple, yet appropriately challenging vocabulary. It also provides fine entertainment as it can hold a young man, who favors outdoor activities and sports, and his attention span for countless hours. A most highly reccomended series of books designed to encourage and develop young readers.

This is my all time favorite Hank the Cowdog book! I love Madam Moonshine and Wallace and Junior. It's witty and humorous throughout the book. I'm impatiently waiting for #34 to come out. I recomend any of these books to children and adult alike.

Poor Hank! This makes a great sequel to number one! This is one of the best, and the cure for this terrible disease is hilarious! I would recommend this book to any Hank the Cowdog fan! - MG

I have not counted the number of books and papers regarding Geronimo's surrender but they are many. Here are the facts, easy to read, accurate, and presented in a very enjoyable read. The author has done an excellent job presenting to the common man the story of bravery, death, and hardship of the early American soldier, and the betrayal of the American Indian. Many thanks to the author and publisher. Where are the awards for them?

KLIATT, November 2000 Reviewed by Raymond L. Puffer, Ph.D., Historian, Edwards Air Force Base, CA

Most historical accounts of Geronimo and the lengthy struggle of his Apache warriors against white settlement have focused upon either the Chiricahua leader himself, or the two U.S. Army generals usually credited with forcing their bitter surrender. George Crook and Nelson Miles were indeed instrumental in planning and leading the campaigns that hounded the remnants of the Apache people into their inevitable subjugation. Neither, however, could convince the holdouts ot lay down their arms and put themselves at the white man's mercy. That role fell to a weary cavalry lieutenant, Charles B. Gatewood, who had won the Indians' grudging respect through hard fighting and his sympathy to their plight. In the course of a final meeting, which was as poignant as it was historical, Gatewood at length persuaded the exhausted "renegades" to lay down their arms to General

Miles, and to accept his offer of farmland and aid. When Geronimo did so, the last native resistance to federal hegemony came to an end. Ultimately, though, Geronimo and Lieutenant Gatewood were betrayed by the federal government.

Louis Kraft has written an important and historically significant study of the final phase of the Apache Wars. Unusual for such books, this one is as readable as popular history, and it will be enjoyed by those who have an interest in looking behind the scenes of history. The book is a fine reminder that earnest, hardworking and suffering people were responsible for the events in their textbooks.

Publishers Weekly, April 17, 2000

This recent addition to the parallel lives genre is a superbly told tale of the vicious Apache wars of the 1880s in Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico. Drawing upon a variety of original sources, Kraft (Custer and the Cheyenne) reconstructs the complex story of the famous Chiricahua leader Geronimo, a medicine man who came forward as a tribal leader and headed resistance to the coerced settlement of his people on reservations where they were to become farmers instead of nomadic hunters. Lt. Charles B. Gatewood of the 6th U.S. Cavalry was posted to Arizona in 1878 and became a respected leader of Apache scouts, who tracked Apache guerrillas for the U.S. The frail lieutenant, sent to administer the Apache reservation, seemingly treated his charges fairly, earning the enmity of civilians and army brass, which led to a stalemated career and a lengthy court case brought by a man whom Gatewood arrested for defrauding Apaches. After meeting at various times and maintaining a mutual respect, Gatewood and Geronimo came together again in 1886, when the former was ordered to track the latter to Mexico and convince him to surrender, even as columns of American and Mexican troops searched for Geronimo's elusive group. The tension and frustrations of what was Gatewood's final mission are palpable, as he convinces Geronimo to allow the tribe's "relocation" to Florida. Gatewood, who gets much fuller treatment here than his counterpart, never got his due for brilliant service in tragically misguided cause, and Geronimo never again saw his homeland or many of his family, from whom he was separated.

"Gatewood and Geronimo" by Louis Kraft documents the heroic deeds of a man of unheralded greatness, of one Charles B. Gatewood. Many lesser men rose to the rank of general while Gatewood died holding the same rank he held when he played the key role in efecting the surrender of the formidable Apache warrior, Geronimo. The surrender of Geronimo effectively ended the American Indian Wars. Kraft's volume brings focus on the long neglected importance of Gatewood's role in American history, and on the long term effects that one ordinary man's moral integrity can have on human history, even though it was ignored, and even despised while Gatewood was alive.

Most students of the Wild West who persist are surprised to find that the real Wild West occurred much sooner than when most of the movies are placed. Calfornia in the 1850s was the most dangerous place and time in America, the classic Wild West period later on was tame by comparison. As usual, history is more interesting and fascinating than fiction and a lot of the roots about the way we think of things were planted as the 49ers struggled to survive in the killing gold fields. A great job of research and a valuable 'must' addition to any serious Western library.

A Review from Wild West Magazine, October 1999:

It is an odd twist of history. Hollywood created the gunfighter myth and placed its heroes primarily in Texas, with overlapping gun-toting cowboys in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Montana, Oklahoma and the Dakotas. Yet, when we think of California in terms of the Wild West, we usually think of someone salting a gold mine...period. It's high time, on the 150th anniversary of the Forty-Niners' rush to the far coast, to rethink Old California.

San Francisco attorney and historian John Boessenecker has done as much as anyone to change and illuminate California's Wild West image. With intense research and fine writing skills, Boessenecker brings us gunfighters, thieves, assassins, gamblers and highwaymen, the likes of which one seldom reads about. And these are not just ordinary ruffians and ne'er-do-wells; these people stole from other folks in a wide variety of ways and made an art out of shooting and cutting up friends as well as enemies.

So while we have plenty of biographies of Billy the Kid and lots of reruns on the OK Corral, it's refreshing that Boessenecker presents solid information on interesting but mostly overlooked California characters and events. The author says that the decade of turbulence and bloodshed that followed the discovery of gold "has not been equaled before or since in the history of peacetime America." In the epilogue, Boessenecker presents some murder-rate figures that lend support to that statement. He concludes that the gold seekers' ready resort to violence "left an enduring mark on our nation's history."

If you would like a good read (367 pages) about how gold fever ignited a rush not only of families, but of prostitutes, feuds, lynchings, duels, bare-knuckle prize fights, and vigilantes, then this is the place to start, the book to open.

Leon Metz

Boessenecker's Gold Rush era-California is wilder than Tombstone, Dodge City and Deadwood on a Saturday night Fourth of July weekend. I thought I knew the Old West, but I didn't, because I didn't know Old California. Now I do. The chapter on Joaquin Murrieta is worth the price of the book and clears away a cloud of unknowing about California's most legendary bandit. I hope this is just volume one. --- Allen Barra, author of Inventing Wyatt Earp

Our home is full of the books that we have been collecting over the past thirty-five years and we visit them all from time to time. But "Gone To Sanctuary", is one of those dynamic, evocative books that we keep close by so that we can continue to revisit and share its richness with our family and friends.

The previous reviewers have already expressed my own view of Mr Kiewit's visually and verbally stunning book. All I can add is that "Gone To Sanctuary" is a precious gift from a talented artist and that it will always occupy a place of honour in our home.

John Kiewit's photographs make me want to get in my car and head to the places of Western America that look blank on the maps. The richness of texture and color in his photgraphs alone are enough to make this book a welcome treasure in your coffee table library. But it is the quotes he pulled from his own diaries of a generation of traveling the backroads of the West, along with appropriate words from others -- famous and little-known -- that set this book apart from the many other fine photographic essays available. The words and pictures together stimulate wanderlust, whether it be the armchair or actual type. Whenever I reread "On the Road" -- I want to get back on the open highway. So is it for me with Kiewit's photographs. Fairness requires me to announce here that he and I are friends, and we've traveled many of the roads of the West together. This fact does not prejudice my opinion of his book. Take a look at it for yourself and you'll agree that the power of his landscapes and his eye for the ghosts of passing civilization make Kiewit a worthy heir to the traditions of Adams, Weston, and Walker.

At first glance John Kiewit¹s GONE TO SANCTUARY looks like an elegant coffee table book of beautiful photographs. It truly is much more than that. Kiewit takes us on a journey of the American West that few have had the opportunity to experience; fewer have taken the time to appreciate.

For those who will not be able to make the trip, and for those who may very well be inspired to take it after enjoying this remarkable book, John displays his photographic expertise and communicates his passions for our gratification.

Opposite each stunning photograph is a quote that Kiewit feels appropriate to the photo. One can often linger on a quote for almost as long as on the photograph. The interplay between the image and the words is one of the things that sets this photo-journal apart from others. The obviously well read Kiewit drew most of the quotes from writers who he felt best expressed the emotion spawned by the photograph. Where he finds it appropriate, John quotes from his travel journal that spans three decades. It is when he uses his own quotes that we often feel closest to the author.

It is not an exaggeration to say that everything about GONE TO SANCTUARY is outstanding. Kiewit has laid out his art, and his heart, for those who can appreciate the true beauty of this publication. This book generates an abundance of personal thought, and one ought not attempt read it in a single sitting. As John quotes Everett Ruess on page 74, I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear.

Jeff KruthersSanta Barbara, California

George Eklund's poems compare favorably with the true immortals of contemporary verse -- Eric Cash, Paula Fountain -- hell, even Jeff Weddle. You simply can't go wrong with an Eklund poem. His stuff is tight, edgy, dark, and downright brilliant. This book should be in every library in America.

All hail Eklund!

I lost my copy of this book years ago and would love to be able to replace it. Eklund's style is dark and gorgeous, a fine antidote to so much of the intellectual garbage that passed for poetry in recent years.

This one's a keeper, a book that very much deserves to be back in print.

It's a shame this book is out of print. I first read it maybe ten years ago when I was in graduate school working on an M.A. in English. Elkund's poems jumped off the page at me. His style is spare, powerful and direct, and deserves a broad readership. Eklund is one of those great unknown poets, the kind we keep in our romantic subconscious, the kind of voice you might imagine working away in a small furnished room, battling despair and mania, hoping to catch a break. Read this one if you can get your hands on it.

"It's a very readable book. These are comfortable histories."

--Dr. Otto Ravenholt, Former Chief Health Officer, Clark County Health District, Las Vegas, Nevada

"Just what the Doctor ordered. Well written and very informative. But wait - doctors saw the same patients more than once? I guess in the days before HMO's, treatment was less of a gamble"

"Annie Blachley's elegantly written Good Medicine offers a compelling look at how the medical profession has changed over the years, but more than that, it presents a fascinating picture of early-day Nevada and of the country and world during the war years and afterwards. Blachley's eye for detail is outstanding. This is one of the best books ever about how Nevada and Las Vegas came to be." --Larry Henry, former political editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal's 6/7/00 article by Ben Rogers captures what this book is all about; excerpts from his article follow. "It was an era predating Medicare, Medicaid, HMOs and malpractice insurance, a time when doctors practiced the art of healing--a cheaper, simpler and more personal version of modern medicine....The 'Golden Age' of medicine ran from about 1940 to 1990 and was characterized by a more personal approach to patients. 'If you ask people today about their biggest problems with HMOs, they say that they never get enough time with their doctor,' said Blachley, a Nevada medical history enthusiast and author of Good Medicine. 'The majority of doctors practicing today are overburdened by paperwork and restricted reimbursement amounts, all brought about by the powerful medical insurance industry. Doctors used to have time to sit down and become friends with their patients.' Blachley decided against a traditional oral history approach to the book--which she said can sometimes turn aimless--and tried instead to tell a focused tale. "I...made it more of a story, a narrative of their lives,' she said.

Goodbye Buffalo Sky deserves to become a classic in the tradition of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. Although written for young adults, it is a powerful story beautifully told that could be enjoyed by any reader. Set in North America during the white settlement of the American West, this is a rich and complex story told with eloquent simplicity. Cappy and Alice, two teenagers who live in the small frontier town of Buffalo Sky take turns in telling the story of Two Songs, a beautiful young Mandan Indian who marries a local artist, Buckhart, and the effect their friendship with her has on their lives.

This is one of those books that stays with you for years after you've read it.

Ignore "Kirkus Reviews" and note instead the "Booklist" review, and the quotes provided by the author from the English reviews. "Goodbye, Buffalo Sky" is an immediately captivating tale [young Cappy is caught peeping as an artist paints a nude of his wife], told alternately by Cappy and friend Alice. Humor, page-turning narrative drive, and insightful characterizations make this tale of the great American prairie, a bit over one hundred years ago, a first-rate Western for readers ages 10-14.

It is 1870 on the northern plains in a small pioneer settlement called Buffalo Sky; orphaned twelve year old Cappy Carrew lives in a boarding house. When his painting teacher and friend is murdered by a Sioux Indian, and his Indian wife driven out of town, Cappy sets off across the plains in pursuit of the killer, accompanied by Alice, a girl eager for adventure. Alice and the Indian woman, Two Songs, are captured by the Sioux; Cappy sets off in pursuit. He and Alice return to Buffalo Sky only to find the town in ruins and the survivors having fled. Although it ultimitley leaves you hanging, this book is an exciting, action packed western, and sure to be a page turner!