Empire of Shadows
Subtitle: The Epic Story of Yellowstone
By: George Black
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 560
ISBN-13: 9780312383190; 9781429989749
Subjects: Yellowstone National Park; History; Discovery and exploration
Description: In a radical reinterpretation of the 19th-century West, the author casts Yellowstone's creation as the culmination of three interwoven strands of history, the passion for exploration, the violence of the Indian Wars and the "civilizing" of the frontier. It is the epic story of the conquest of Yellowstone, Wyoming, a landscape uninhabited, inaccessible and shrouded in myth in the aftermath of the Civil War. He charts its course through the lives of those who sought to lay bare its mysteries: Lt. Gustavus Cheyney Doane, a gifted but tormented cavalryman known as "the man who invented Wonderland"; the ambitious former vigilante leader Nathaniel Langford; scientist Ferdinand Hayden, who brought photographer William Henry Jackson and painter Thomas Moran to Yellowstone; and Gen. Phil Sheridan, Civil War hero and architect of the Indian Wars, who finally succeeded in having the new National Park placed under the protection of the U.S. Cavalry. This book is a historical account of the origins of America's majestic national landmark.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.