Hell on the Range A Story of Honor, Conscience, and the American West Daniel Justin Herman

Series:
Lamar Series in Western History
Format:
Hardback
Publication date:
05 Nov 2010
ISBN:
9780300137361
Dimensions:
384 pages: 234 x 156 x 30mm
Illustrations:
40 black-&-white illustrations

In this lively account of Arizona's Rim Country War of the 1880s, historian Daniel Justin Herman explores a web of conflict involving Mormons, Texas cowboys, New Mexican sheepherders, Jewish merchants, and mixed-blood ranchers. Their story, contends Herman, offers a fresh perspective on Western violence, Western identity, and American cultural history. At the heart of Arizona's range war, argues Herman, was a conflict between cowboys' code of honour and Mormons' code of conscience. He investigates the sources of these attitudes, tracks them into the early twentieth century, and offers rich insights into the roots of American violence and peace.

Daniel Justin Herman is associate professor, Central Washington University. He is author of the award-winning Hunting and the American Imagination.

"This is a rich, deep, and rewarding work of western history - a genuine contribution to the histories of American violence, society and culture, politics, and economics. Herman's research is nothing less than extraordinary as it taps an especially rich body of personal papers as well as published and unpublished memoirs. It will become a classic in the historiography of the American West."--Durwood Ball, University of New Mexico

--Durwood Ball