The massacre at Mountain Meadows on September 11, 1857, was the single most violent attack on a wagon train in the thirty-year history of the Oregon and California trails. Yet it has been all but forgotten. Will Bagley's Blood of the Prophets is an award-winning, riveting account of the attack on the Baker-Fancher wagon train by Mormons in the local militia and a few Paiute Indians. Based on extensive investigation of the events surrounding the murder of over 120 men, women, and children, and drawing from a wealth of primary sources, Bagley explains how the murders occurred, reveals the involvement of territorial governor Brigham Young, and explores the subsequent suppression and distortion of events related to the massacre by the Mormon Church and others.

Wallace Stegner called South Pass one of the most deceptive and impressive places in the West. Nowhere can travelers cross the Rockies so easily as through this high, treeless valley in Wyoming immediately south of the Wind River Mountains. South Pass has received much attention in lore and memory but attracted no serious book-length study--until now. In this narrative, award-winning author Will Bagley explains the significance of South Pass to the nation's history and to the development of the American West.

Fur traders first saw South Pass in 1812. From the early 1840s until the completion of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads almost forty years later, emigrants on the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails used South Pass in transforming the American West in a single generation. Bagley traces the peopling of the region by the earliest inhabitants and adventurers, including Indian peoples, trappers and fur traders, missionaries, and government-commissioned explorers. Later, California gold rushers, Latter-day Saints, and families seeking new lives went through this singular gap in the Rockies. Without South Pass, overland wagons beginning their journey far to the east along the Missouri River could not have reached their destinations in a single season, and western settlement might have been delayed for decades.

The story of South Pass offers a rich history. The Overland Stage, Pony Express, and first transcontinental telegraph all came through the region. Nearly a century later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower designated South Pass as one of America's first National Historic Landmarks. An American place so rich in historical significance, Bagley argues, deserves the best of historical preservation efforts.

The story of America's westward migration is a powerful blend of fact and fable. Over the course of three decades, almost a million eager fortune-hunters, pioneers, and visionaries transformed the face of a continent--and displaced its previous inhabitants. The people who made the long and perilous journey over the Oregon and California trails drove this swift and astonishing change. In this magisterial volume, Will Bagley tells why and how this massive emigration began.

While many previous authors have told parts of this story, Bagley has recast it in its entirety for modern readers. Drawing on research he conducted for the National Park Service's Long Distance Trails Office, he has woven a wealth of primary sources--personal letters and journals, government documents, newspaper reports, and folk accounts--into a compelling narrative that reinterprets the first years of overland migration.

Illustrated with photographs and historical maps, So Rugged and Mountainous is the first of a projected four-volume history, Overland West: The Story of the Oregon and California Trails. This sweeping series describes how the Road across the Plains transformed the American West and became an enduring part of its legacy. And by showing that overland emigration would not have been possible without the cooperation of Native peoples and tribes, it places American Indians at the center of trail history, not on its margins.

The Whites Want Everything restores those Native voices to the history of colonization of the American Southwest. Collecting a wealth of documents from varied and often-suppressed sources, this volume allows both Indians and Latter-day Saints to tell their stories as they struggled to determine who would control the land and resources of North America's Great Basin. Journals, letters, reports, and recollections, many from firsthand participants, reveal the complexities of cooperation and conflict between Native Americans and Mormon Anglo-Americans. The documents offer extraordinarily wide-ranging and detailed perspectives on the fight to survive in one of Earth's most challenging environments.

Editor Will Bagley, a scholar of Mormon history and the American West, provides cultural, historical, and environmental context for the documents, which include the Indians' own eloquent voices as preserved in the region's remarkable archives. In all these accounts, we see how some of western North America's most colorful historical characters recorded their adventures and regarded their painful stories--and how, in doing so, they bring light to a dark chapter in American history. Ranging from initial encounters through the 1850-1872 war against Native tribes, to recitations of Mormon millennial dreams continued long after Brigham Young's death in 1877, this is history as it happened, not as some might wish it had, at long last returning the original owners of today's Utah, Nevada, and Colorado to their rightful place in history.

During the mid-nineteenth century, a quarter of a million travelers-men, women, and children-followed the road across the plains to gold rush California. This magnificent chronicle-the second installment of Will Bagley's sweeping Overland West series-captures the danger, excitement, and heartbreak of America's first great rush for riches and its enduring consequences. With narrative scope and detail unmatched by earlier histories, With Golden Visions Bright Before Them retells this classic American saga through the voices of the people whose eyewitness testimonies vividly evoke the most dramatic era of westward migration.

Traditional histories of the overland roads paint the gold rush migration as a heroic epic of progress that opened new lands and a continental treasure house for the advancement of civilization. Yet, according to Bagley, the transformation of the American West during this period is more complex and contentious than legend pretends. The gold rush epoch witnessed untold suffering and sacrifice, and the trails and their trials were enough to make many people turn back. For America's Native peoples, the effect of the massive migration was no less than ruinous. The impact that tens of thousands of intruders had on Native peoples and their homelands is at the center of this story, not on its margins.

Beautifully written and richly illustrated with photographs and maps, With Golden Visions Bright Before Them continues the saga that began with Bagley's highly acclaimed, award-winning So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812-1848, hailed by critics as a classic of western history.

During the mid-nineteenth century, a quarter of a million travelers-men, women, and children-followed the road across the plains to gold rush California. This magnificent chronicle-the second installment of Will Bagley's sweeping Overland West series-captures the danger, excitement, and heartbreak of America's first great rush for riches and its enduring consequences. With narrative scope and detail unmatched by earlier histories, With Golden Visions Bright Before Them retells this classic American saga through the voices of the people whose eyewitness testimonies vividly evoke the most dramatic era of westward migration.

Traditional histories of the overland roads paint the gold rush migration as a heroic epic of progress that opened new lands and a continental treasure house for the advancement of civilization. Yet, according to Bagley, the transformation of the American West during this period is more complex and contentious than legend pretends. The gold rush epoch witnessed untold suffering and sacrifice, and the trails and their trials were enough to make many people turn back. For America's Native peoples, the effect of the massive migration was no less than ruinous. The impact that tens of thousands of intruders had on Native peoples and their homelands is at the center of this story, not on its margins.

Beautifully written and richly illustrated with photographs and maps, With Golden Visions Bright Before Them continues the saga that began with Bagley's highly acclaimed, award-winning So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812-1848, hailed by critics as a classic of western history.

Beginning in the spring of 1969, Huckleberry Finn inspired a question: Could you build a raft, float down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and on the way learn something about America and its peoples? Will Bagley, a vagrant longhair and future prize-winning western historian, and his friends could, and did. Now, a half century after the adventure, Bagley tells his story.