As Big as the West: The Pioneer Life of Granville Stuart
Starred Review. Milner and O'Connor, two leading historians of the American West, deliver an outstanding history of Granville Stuart (1834–1918), a Gold Rush miner, Montana cattle baron and hanging-hungry vigilante as well as a master of languages, a U.S. ambassador to Paraguay and Uruguay, and the author of an intriguing autobiography,Forty Years on the Frontier. Stuart's various successes were based not only on hard work, but on the unbridled exploitation of resources and native peoples, particularly the Shoshone. Although he learned the Shoshone language and married a Shoshone woman, Stuart disavowed their 11 children after 26 years, at the time of his second marriage, to a white woman. Stuart spent his final days in reduced circumstances, the one resource he had left to peddle being his romanticized memories of the early West. He left behind a room full of diaries—material that Milner and O'Connor, a husband-and-wife team and both history professors at Arkansas State, put to superb use as they probe the complexities of this archetypal Western settler. B&w illus., maps.(Dec.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.