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 transcontinental railroad in 1869. In two decades, the West was conquered and the secession movement rose and fell. From slow ox-team and prairie schooner to the dashing Pony Express, the overland mail service mirrored these monumental strides.Originally published in 1926, The Overland Mail was the first scholarly work to examine the impact of the postal service on the expansion of the West as the service evolved from a private endeavor to a government-contracted business. LeRoy R. Hafen details how the mail service tied West to East, influenced politics and economics, promoted use of the overland trails, aided in settlement, and helped usher in the railroads.This classic work is here available in paperback for the first time. In a new foreword, David Dary assesses Hafen’s contributions as a writer and historian.

Overland Mail, 1849-1869

History

Hafen, LeRoy R.

Americas

Ams Pr Inc

To weary travelers on the Oregon Trail during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Fort Laramie was a welcome sight. Its walls and flag-decked towers rose from the high plains, their solidity suggesting that the white man was gaining a toehold in the wilderness. Hafen and Young present the colorful history of Fort Laramie from its establishment as Fort John in 1834 to its abandonment in 1890. Early on, the fort was controlled by the American Fur Company and patronized by trappers like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson. Then it was a vital supply center and rest stop for a tide of emigrants--missionaries, Mormons, forty-niners, and homeseekers.As more wagons rolled west and the Pony Express came through, the need for protection increased; in 1849, Fort Laramie was converted from a trapper's post into a military fort. Down through the years there were skirmishes with the Plains Indians, who sometimes came to the fort to barter and to treat. The peace council of 1851—one of the largest gatherings of tribes ever seen in the Old West—is here described in fascinating detail.The cast of characters in this great historical pageant reads like a who's who of the American West.

Fort Laramie and the Pageant of the West, 1834-1890

Young, Francis Marion

University Of Nebraska Press

Known by the Indians as "Broken Hand," Thomas Fitzpatrick was a trapper and a trailblazer who became the head of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. With Jedediah Smith he led the trapper band that discovered South Pass; he then shepherded the first two emigrant wagon trains to Oregon, was official guide to Fremont on his longest expedition, and guided Colonel Phil Kearny and his Dragoons along the westward trails to impress the Indians with howitzers and swords. Fitzpatrick negotiated the Fort Laramie treaty of 1851 at the largest council of Plains Indians ever assembled. Among the most colorful of mountain men, Fitzpatrick was also party to many of the most important events in the opening of the West.

Broken Hand: The Life of Thomas Fitzpatrick, Mountain Man, Guide and Indian Agent (Bison Book S)

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Bison Books

To weary travelers on the Oregon Trail during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Fort Laramie was a welcome sight. Its walls and flag-decked towers rose from the high plains, their solidity suggesting that the white man was gaining a toehold in the wilderness. 
Hafen and Young present the colorful history of Fort Laramie from its establishment as Fort John in 1834 to its abandonment in 1890. Early on, the fort was controlled by the American Fur Company and patronized by trappers like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson. Then it was a vital supply center and rest stop for a tide of emigrants--missionaries, Mormons, forty-niners, and homeseekers.
As more wagons rolled west and the Pony Express came through, the need for protection increased; in 1849, Fort Laramie was converted from a trapper's post into a military fort. Down through the years there were skirmishes with the Plains Indians, who sometimes came to the fort to barter and to treat. The peace council of 1851—one of the largest gatherings of tribes ever seen in the Old West—is here described in fascinating detail.
The cast of characters in this great historical pageant reads like a who's who of the American West.

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 the three thousand hardy souls who trudged across thirteen hundred miles of prairie, desert, and mountain from 1856 to 1860 were European converts to the Mormon faith. Without funds for wagons and oxen, they carried their possessions in two-wheeled carts powered and aided by their own muscle and blood. Some of the weary travelers would finally be welcomed by their brethren in Salt Lake City; others would go to wayside graves or get caught in early winter storms in the Rockies and hope to be rescued by the parties sent out by Brigham Young. The migration is described in Handcarts to Zion, which draws on diaries and reports of the participants, rosters of the ten companies, and a collection of the songs sung on the trail and at "The Gathering." LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen dedicated the book to his mother, Mary Ann Hafen, who wrote about the long journey in Recollections of a Handcart Pioneer of 1860: A Woman’s Life on the Mormon Frontier, also a Bison Book.

Handcarts to Zion: The Story of a Unique Western Migration, 1856-1860

Hafen, Ann W.

Religion & Spirituality

This classic history is filled with colorful pathmarkers like Jedediah Smith, John C. Frémont, and Kit Carson; with packers, home seekers, and mail couriers; and with horse thieves and enslavers of Indian women and children.

Old Spanish Trail

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 Island to subposts beyond the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. Fur Traders, Trappers, and Mountain Men of the Upper Missouri focuses on eighteen men who represented the American Fur Company and its successors in the Upper Missouri trade. Their biographies have been compiled from the classic ten-volume Mountain Men and the Fur Trade of the Far West, edited by LeRoy R. Hafen. These chapters bring back movers and shapers of a great venture: Ramsay Crooks, the mountain man who headed the American Fur Company after Astor; Kenneth McKenzie, “King of the Missouri;” Gabriel Franchere, survivor of the Astorian disaster; Charles Larpenteur, commander of Fort Union and fur-trade chronicler. Here, too, are the fiery William Laidlaw, ambitious James Kipp and John Cabanne Sr., diplomatic David Dawson Mitchell and Malcolm Clark, goutish James A. Hamilton (Palmer), controversial John F. A. Sanford and Francis A. Chardon, easy-going William Gordon, and ill-fated William E. Vanderburgh. Completing this memorable cast are Alexander Culbertson, skilled hunter; Auguste Pike Vasquez, mountain man; Henry A. Boller, educated clerk; and Jean Baptiste Moncravie, trader and raconteur.

Fur Traders, Trappers, and Mountain Men of the Upper Missouri

Danger, hardship, and isolation could not turn back the tide of men and women who thirsted for yellow metal. The Pike’s Peak gold rush of 1859 attracted as many gold seekers as the more famous California gold rush of the previous decade. In this volume, noted western historian LeRoy R. Hafen has collected invaluable Pike’s Peak gold rush diaries chronicling the struggles, dreams, and heartaches of those who traveled the overland routes to untold riches. 
The diarists who came along the Arkansas and Platte Rivers and along trails from Texas, Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois created records of the landscapes and peoples they encountered as they journeyed. In the words of these single-minded adventurers, larger-than-life characters mingle with the awesome, terrible beauty of the Great Plains and the sparse comforts of the old Middle West. The Pike’s Peak gold rushers provide firsthand accounts of the dangers and rewards of overland travel, as they sought ephemeral fortunes in the Rocky Mountain West.

To the Pike's Peak Gold Fields, 1859

Reprint of original 1926 edition: The Overland Mail 1849-1869. Promoter of settlement, Precursor of Railroads. The story of the extension of the postal service into the Trans-Mississippi region and to the Pacific Coast.

The Overland Mail

Business & Money

Quarterman Pubns

Fremont's Fourth Expedition: A Documentary Account Of The Disaster Of 1848-1849

With Diaries, Letters, And Reports By Participants In The Tragedy. Far West And The Rockies Historical Series, 1820-1875, V11.

Fremont's Fourth Expedition: A Documentary Account of the Disaster of 1848-1849

Literary Licensing, LLC

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hafen, LeRoy R.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hafen, LeRoy R.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hafen, LeRoy R.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Overland Mail, 1849-1869

Fort Laramie and the Pageant of the West, 1834-1890

Broken Hand: The Life of Thomas Fitzpatrick, Mountain Man, Guide and Indian Agent (Bison Book S)

Fort Laramie and the Pageant of the West, 1834-1890

Handcarts to Zion: The Story of a Unique Western Migration, 1856-1860

Old Spanish Trail

Fur Traders, Trappers, and Mountain Men of the Upper Missouri

To the Pike's Peak Gold Fields, 1859

The Overland Mail

Fremont's Fourth Expedition: A Documentary Account of the Disaster of 1848-1849