LibGuides: Spur Awards: Western Historical Nonfiction

SPUR Awards

Best Western Historical Nonfiction

2020s

WINNER

Lakota America: a new history of indigenous power by Byron E. Pearson

FINALISTS:

The Mormon Handcart Migration: "Tongue nor pen can never tell the sorrow" by Candy Moulton
Terror on the Santa Fe Trail: Kit Carson and the Jicarilla Apache by Doug Hocking

WINNER

The Last Sovereigns by Robert M. Utley

The Last Sovereigns : Sitting Bull and the resistance of the Free Lakotas by Robert M. Utley
Call Number: BIO SITTI BUL U (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9781496220226
Publication Date: 2020-10-01
The story of how Sitting Bull resisted the white man's ways as a last best hope for the survival of an indigenous way of life-a nomadic life based on the buffalo--sacred to him and to his people.

FINALISTS:

Beneath the Backbone of the World by Ryan Hall
South to Freedom by Alice L. Baumgartner

South to Freedom : runaway slaves to Mexico and the road to the Civil War by Alice L. Baumgartner
Call Number: 306.362 B348s (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781541617780
Publication Date: 2020-11-10
The Underground Railroad to the North was salvation for many US slaves before the Civil War. But during the same decades, thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico. In South to Freedom historian Alice Baumgartner tells the story of Mexico's rise as an antislavery republic and a promised land for enslaved people in North America. She describes how Mexico's abolition of slavery challenged US institutions and helped to set the international stage for the US Civil War. In 1837, shortly after Texas rebelled against Mexican rule, Mexico's Congress formally abolished slavery, and enslaved people began to head south. Some were helped by free blacks, ship captains, Mexicans, Germans, gamblers, preachers, mail riders, and other 'lurking scoundrels,' but most escaped by their own ingenuity--with stolen rifles, forged slave passes, and, in one instance, a wig made from horsehair and pitch. As they fled across the Rio Grande, and the US government failed to secure their return, their owners began to suspect an international conspiracy against the 'peculiar institution.' Meanwhile, Northern Congressmen balked at reestablishing slavery in the Southwestern territories taken from Mexico after the Mexican-American War. Feeling increasingly embattled, slavers in Texas and Louisiana came to believe that their interests would best be protected outside the union. With the Southern slave regime under pressure from both the north and south, the conditions were in place for the coming of the US Civil War. Today, our attention is fixed on people seeking opportunity by moving north across our southern border, but South to Freedom reveals what happened when the reverse was true: when American slaves fled 'the land of the free' for freedom in Mexico.

WINNER:

Cheyenne Summer: the Battle of Beecher Island: a history by Terry Mort

Cheyenne Summer : the Battle of Beecher Island : a history by Terry Mort
Call Number: 973.81 M887c (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781643137100
Publication Date: 2021-07-06
Evoking the spirit--and danger--of the early American West, this is the story of the Battle of Beecher Island, pitting an outnumbered United States Army patrol against six hundred Native warriors, where heroism on both sides of the conflict captures the vital themes at play on the American frontier.

FINALISTS:

War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American invasion by Jeff Guinn
Iron Women: the ladies who helped build the railroad by Chris Enss

War on the Border : Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American invasion by Jeff Guinn
Call Number: 972.08 G964w (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781982128869
Publication Date: 2021-05-18
The dramatic story of how U.S.-Mexico border tensions erupted into open warfare in 1916, as a U.S. military expedition crossed the border to try to capture Mexican guerrilla Pancho Villa -- a military incursion whose effects still haunt the border region to this day.
Iron Women : the ladies who helped build the railroad by Chris Enss
Call Number: 385.092 E59i (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781493037759
Publication Date: 2021-03-01
A history of the contributions women made to the building of the US railroad system.

WINNER: Saving Yellowstone : Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America by Megan Kate Nelson

Saving Yellowstone : exploration and preservation in Reconstruction America by Megan Kate Nelson
Call Number: 978.7 N428s (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781982141332
Publication Date: 2022-03-01
Propulsive and vividly told story of how Yellowstone became the world's first national park amid the nationwide turmoil and racial violence of the Reconstruction era. Each year nearly four million people visit Yellowstone National Park--one of the most popular of all national parks--but few know the fascinating and complex historical context in which it was established. In late July 1871, the geologist-explorer Ferdinand Hayden led a team of scientists through a narrow canyon into Yellowstone Basin, entering one of the last unmapped places in the country. The survey's discoveries led to the passage of the Yellowstone Act in 1872, which created the first national park in the world. Follows Hayden and two other protagonists in pursuit of their own agendas: Sitting Bull, a Lakota leader who asserted his peoples' claim to their homelands, and financier Jay Cooke, who wanted to secure his national reputation by building the Northern Pacific Railroad through the Great Northwest. Hayden, Cooke, and Sitting Bull staked their claims to Yellowstone at a critical moment in Reconstruction, when the Grant Administration and the 42nd Congress were testing the reach and the purpose of federal power across the nation. A narrative of adventure and exploration, Saving Yellowstone is also a story of Indigenous resistance, the expansive reach of railroad, photographic, and publishing technologies, and the struggles of Black southerners to bring racial terrorists to justice. It reveals how the early 1870s were a turning point in the nation's history, as white Americans ultimately abandoned the the higher ideal of equality for all people, creating a much more fragile and divided United States.

FINALISTS:

The Earth is All That Lasts : Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the Last Stand of the Great Sioux Nation by Mark Lee Gardner
The Widowed Ones : Beyond the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Christ Enss and Howard Kazanjian with Chris Kortlander

The Earth Is All That Lasts : Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the last stand of the great Sioux Nation by Mark Lee Gardner
Call Number: BIO SIOUX CHSB G (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780062669896
Publication Date: 2022-06-21
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull: Their names are iconic, their significance in American history undeniable. These two Lakota chiefs, one a fabled warrior and the other a revered holy man, crushed George Armstrong Custer's vaunted Seventh Cavalry. Gardner delivers the definitive chronicle of these extraordinary Indigenous leaders. Both were born and grew to manhood on the High Plains of the American West, in an era when vast herds of buffalo covered the earth, and when their nomadic people could move freely, following the buffalo and lording their fighting prowess over rival Indian nations. But neither man had known a time without whites. On June 25, 1876, in the valley of the Little Big Horn, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and the warriors who followed them fought the last stand of the Sioux. It was their greatest victory, but it was also the beginning of the end for their treasured and sacred way of life.
The Widowed Ones : beyond the Battle of Little Bighorn by Chris Enss
Call Number: 920 E59w (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781493045945
Publication Date: 2022-06-15
Nine months after the massacre at Custer's Last Stand, Elizabeth Custer scheduled a reunion with the widows of the Little Big Horn. On June 25, 1887, the women met in Monroe, Michigan, to reflect on the events leading up to the battle, remember the loved ones that were killed, and share how they have been able to go on. The widows got together every year for more than twenty years. In between reunions they corresponded with each other, exchanged photographs, and supported one another through the difficult times. The Widowed Ones: Beyond the Battle of the Little Bighorn tells the stories of these women and the unique bond they shared through never-before-seen materials from the Elizabeth Custer Library and Museum at Garryowen, Montana, including letters between Elizabeth Custer and the other widows, letters to and from politicians and the widows supporting and criticizing General Custer, and agendas and pictures of the widows at the annual meetings.

WINNER: Continental Reckoning : the American West in the Age of Expansion by Elliott West

FINALISTS:

The First Migrants : How Black Homesteaders' Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America's Great Migration by Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld
Fortune's Frenzy : a California Gold Rush Odyssey by Eilene Lyon

2010s

WINNER

Fort Laramie by Douglas C. McChristian

FINALISTS:

Dodge City: the early years, 1872-1886 by William B. Schillingberg
Crossing the Plains with Custer by Paul Horsted, Ernest Grafe & Jon Nelson

WINNER

The Killing of Crazy Horse by Thomas Powers

FINALISTS:

Beyond Bear's Paw by Jerome A. Green
So Rugged and Mountainous by Will Bagley

WINNER

The Mormon Rebellion by David L. Bigler and Will Bagley

FINALISTS:

After Custer by Paul L. Hedren
Railroaded by Richard White

WINNER

With Golden Visions Bright Before Them: trails to the mining West, 1849-1852 by Will Bagley

FINALISTS:

Terrible Justice: Sioux Chiefs and U.S. Soldiers on the Upper Missouri, 1954-1868 by Doreen Chaky
Deliverance from the Little Big Horn: Doctor Henry Porter and Custer's Seventh Cavalry by Joan Nabseth Stevenson

WINNER

Shot All to Hell: Jesse James, the Northfield Raid, and the Wild West's Greatest Escape by Mark Lee Gardner

Shot All to Hell : Jesse James, the Northfield Raid and the wild west's greatest escape by Mark Lee Gardner
Call Number: 364.15 J27g (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780061989476
Publication Date: 2013-07-23
Recounts the thrilling life of Jesse James, Frank James, the Younger brothers, and the most famous bank robbery of all time -- the Northfield raid -- which led to a two-week chase ending with the bloody final shootout on the Watonwan River.

FINALISTS:

Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud: Custer, the press and the Little Bighorn by James E. Mueller
The Heart of Everything That Is: the untold story of Red Cloud, and American legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin

The Heart of Everything That Is : the untold story of Red Cloud, an American legend by Bob Drury; Tom Clavin
Call Number: BIO RED CLO D (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9781451654660
Publication Date: 2013-11-05
Red Cloud was the only American Indian in history to defeat the United States Army in a war, forcing the government to sue for peace on his terms. At the peak of Red Cloud’s powers the Sioux could claim control of one-fifth of the contiguous United States and the loyalty of thousands of fierce fighters. But the fog of history has left Red Cloud strangely obscured. Now, thanks to the rediscovery of a lost autobiography, and painstaking research by two award-winning authors, the story of the 19th century’s most powerful and successful Indian warrior can finally be told.

WINNER

American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 by Jerome A. Greene

FINALISTS:

Chasing the Santa Fe Ring: power and privilege in Territorial New Mexico by David L. Caffey
South Pass: gateway to a continent by Will Bagley

WINNER

William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest by William Heath

FINALISTS:

The Oregon Trail: a New American journey by Rinker Buck
Ladies of the Canyons: a league of extraordinary women and their adventures in the American Southwest by Lesley Poling-Kempes

The Oregon Trail : an American journey by Rinker Buck
Call Number: 978 B922o (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781451659160
Publication Date: 2015-06-30
Spanning 2,000 miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific Ocean, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America. In the 15 years before the Civil War, when 400,000 pioneers used it to emigrate West - historians still regard this as the largest land migration of all time - the trail united the coasts, doubled the size of the country, and laid the groundwork for the railroads. The trail years also solidified the American character: our plucky determination in the face of adversity, our impetuous cycle of financial bubbles and busts, the fractious clash of ethnic populations competing for the same jobs and space. Today, amazingly, the trail is all but forgotten.
Ladies of the Canyons : a league of extraordinary women and their adventures in the American Southwest by Lesley Poling-Kempes
Call Number: 920 P768L (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780816524945
Publication Date: 2015-09-17
Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley (founder of Ghost Ranch), Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would follow them.

WINNER

The Apache Wars: the hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the captive boy who started the longest war in American history by Paul Andrew Hutton

The Apache Wars : the hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the captive boy who started the longest war in American history by Paul Andrew Hutton
Call Number: 979.004 A639h (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780770435813
Publication Date: 2016-05-03
Describes the violent history between the frontiersmen and the Native Americans in the Southwestern borderlands by following Mickey Free, a mixed-blood warrior who played a pivotal role in the fighting as he pursued the Apache Kid.

FINALISTS:

American Serengeti: the last big animals of the Great Plains by Dan Flores
The Earth is Weeping: the epic story of the Indian Wars for the American West by Peter Cozzens

American Serengeti : the last big animals of the Great Plains by Dan Flores
Call Number: 591.5 F634A (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780700622276
Publication Date: 2016-04-12
Bison. Horses. Coyotes. Wolves. Grizzly Bears. Pronghorns. A la John McPhee and Edward Hoagland, noted Western and environmental historian Flores dazzles with his vivid, informed, and richly detailed essays on six iconic animals of the American Great Plains. Diving into their genetic past as far back as the Pleistocene epoch and on up to restoration efforts in recent times, Flores is especially evocative and illuminating about the lives of these animals (and their interactions with humans) in the several centuries running from the dawn of the Age of Exploration through the end of the Indian Wars.
The Earth is Weeping [E-Book] : the epic story of the Indian Wars for the American West by Peter Cozzens
Call Number: 9778.02 C882e Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780307958051
Publication Date: 2016
After the Civil War the Indian Wars would last more than three decades, permanently altering the physical and political landscape of America. Peter Cozzens gives us both sides in comprehensive and singularly intimate detail. He illuminates the intertribal strife over whether to fight or make peace; explores the dreary, squalid lives of frontier soldiers and the imperatives of the Indian warrior culture; and describes the ethical quandaries faced by generals who often sympathized with their native enemies. In dramatically relating bloody and tragic events as varied as Wounded Knee, the Nez Perce War, the Sierra Madre campaign, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, we encounter a pageant of fascinating characters, including Custer, Sherman, Grant, and a host of officers, soldiers, and Indian agents, as well as great native leaders such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Red Cloud and the warriors they led. The Earth Is Weeping is a sweeping, definitive history of the battles and negotiations that destroyed the Indian way of life even as they paved the way for the emergence of the United States we know today.

WINNER

Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

Killers of the Flower Moon : the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI by David Grann
Call Number: 976.6 G748k (Adult Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780385534246
Publication Date: 2017-04-18
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more members of the tribe began to die under mysterious circumstances.
Killers of the Flower Moon [Streaming audiobook] : the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI by David Grann
Call Number: OverDrive Audiobook
ISBN: 9780307747471
Publication Date: 2017

FINALISTS:

Cattle Kingdom: the hidden history of the Cowboy West by Christopher Knowlton
Provisions of the Fur Trade: the encyclopedia of trade goods, Vol. 6 by James A. Hanson

Cattle Kingdom : the hidden history of the cowboy West by Christopher Knowlton
Call Number: 978 K73c (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780544369962
Publication Date: 2017-05-30
The open-range cattle era lasted barely a quarter century, but it left America irrevocably changed. These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades. Cattle Kingdom reveals the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We venture from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakota Badlands to the Chicago stockyards. We meet a diverse array of players--from the expert cowboy Teddy Blue to the failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. Knowlton shows us how they and others like them could achieve so many outsized feats: killing millions of bison in a decade, building the first opera house on the open range, driving cattle by the thousands, and much more.

WINNER

Native but Foreign: indigenous immigrants and refugees in the North American borderlands by Brenden W. Rensink

Native But Foreign [E-Book] : indigenous immigrants and refugees in the North American borderlands by Brenden W. Rensink
Call Number: 323.1197 R421n Ebook (Ebooks on EBSCOhost)
ISBN: 9781623496562
Publication Date: 2018
In Native but Foreign, historian Brenden W. Rensink presents an innovative comparison of indigenous peoples who traversed North American borders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examining Crees and Chippewas, who crossed the border from Canada into Montana, and Yaquis from Mexico who migrated into Arizona. The resulting history questions how opposing national borders affect and react differently to Native identity and offers new insights into what it has meant to be “indigenous” or an “immigrant.” Rensink's findings counter a prevailing theme in histories of the American West—namely, that the East was the center that dictated policy to the western periphery. On the contrary, Rensink employs experiences of the Yaquis, Crees, and Chippewas to depict Arizona and Montana as an active and mercurial blend of local political, economic, and social interests pushing back against and even reshaping broader federal policy. Rensink argues that as immediate forces in the borderlands molded the formation of federal policy, these Native groups moved from being categorized as political refugees to being cast as illegal immigrants, subject to deportation or segregation; in both cases, this legal transition was turbulent. Despite continued staunch opposition, Crees, Chippewas, and Yaquis gained legal and permanent settlements in the United States and successfully broke free of imposed transnational identities. Accompanying the thought-provoking text, a vast guide to archival sources across states, provinces, and countries is included to aid future scholarship. Native but Foreign is an essential work for scholars of immigration, indigenous peoples, and borderlands studies.

FINALISTS:

Bonanza King: John Mackay and the battle over the greatest riches in the American West by Gregory Crouch
West Like Lightning: the brief, legendary ride of the Pony Express by Jim DeFelice

The Bonanza King : John Mackay and the battle over the greatest riches in the American West by Gregory Crouch
Call Number: BIO MACKA JOHW C (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9781501108198
Publication Date: 2018-06-19
Born in 1831, John W. Mackay was a penniless Irish immigrant who came of age in New York City, sailed to California during the Gold Rush, and mined without much luck for eight years. When he heard of riches found on the other side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1859, Mackay abandoned his claim and walked a hundred miles to the Comstock Lode in what is present-day Nevada. Over the course of the next dozen years, Mackay worked his way up from nothing, thwarting the pernicious Bank Ring monopoly to seize control of the most concentrated cache of precious metals ever found on earth, the legendary Big Bonanza, a stupendously rich body of gold and silver ore discovered fifteen hundred feet beneath the streets of Virginia City, the ultimate Old West boomtown. But for the ore to be worth anything, it had to be found, claimed, and successfully extracted, each step requiring enormous risk and the creation of an entirely new industry. Now Gregory Crouch tells Mackay's amazing story--how he extracted the ore from deep underground drove stock market frenzies in San Francisco and launched his wife, whose beginnings were as humble as his own, on a meteoric social career among the finest European aristocrats. When Mackay died in 1902--with a personal fortune equivalent to $40 billion today--front-page obituaries in Europe and the United States hailed him as one of the most admired Americans of the age.

2000s

The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution : the bloodiest decade, 1910-1920 by Charles H. Harris; Louis R. Sadler
Call Number: 972.0816 H313t (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780826334848
Publication Date: 2007-03-16
The Decade 1910-1920 was the bloodiest in the controversial history of one of the most famous law enforcement agencies in the world-the Texas Rangers. Much of the bloodshed was along the thousand-mile Texas/Mexico border because these were the years of the Mexican Revolution. Charles Harris III and Louis Sadler shed new light on this turbulent period by uncovering the clandestine role of Mexican President Venustiano Carranza in the border violence. They document two virtually unknown invasions of Texas by Mexican troops acting under Carranza's orders. Harris and Sadler suggest the notorious "Plan de San Diego," usually portrayed by historians as a plot hatched in south Texas, was actually spawned in Mexico by Carranza. This irredentist conspiracy, which called for the execution of all Anglo males sixteen and older and the establishment of a Hispanic republic, was designed to cause a race war between Hispanics and Anglos. One of Carranza's goals was to end the support being given by border residents to his rival Pancho Villa. The "Plan de San Diego" caused the governor of Texas to order the Texas Rangers to wipe out the insurgency along the border. This resulted in an estimated 300 Hispanics being killed by the Rangers and others without benefit of judge and jury. The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution is the first Ranger history to utilize Mexican government archives and the voluminous declassified FBI records on the Mexican Revolution.

Buffalo Bill's America : William Cody and the Wild West Show by Louis S. Warren
Call Number: BIO CODY WILF W (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9780375726583
Publication Date: 2006-12-05
William Cody (1846—1917), a.k.a. Buffalo Bill, was the most famous American of his age. A child of the frontier Great Plains, Cody was renowned as a Pony Express rider, prospector, trapper, Civil War soldier, professional buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, cavalry scout, horseman, dime-novel hero, and actor. But Buffalo Bill’s greatest success was as impresario of the Wild West show, the traveling company of cowboys, Indians, Mexican vaqueros, and others, numbering in the hundreds, with which he toured North America and Europe for more than three decades. As Louis S. Warren reveals, the show company came to represent America itself, its dazzling mix of races sprung from a frontier past, welded into a thrilling performance, and making their way through the world via the modern technologies of railroad, portable electrical generator, telephones, and brilliantly colored publicity–an entrancing vision of the frontier-born, newly mechanized, polyglot United States in the Gilded Age.

WINNER

Creating Minnesota by Annette Atkins

WINNER

Hunting the American West: the pursuit of big game for life, profit, and sport, 1800-1900 by Richard C. Rattenbury

FINALISTS:

Frontier Medicine: from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1492-1941 by David Dary
A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn - the last great battle of the American West by James Donovan

Spur Awards

2020s

WINNER

Lakota America: a new history of indigenous power by Byron E. Pearson

FINALISTS:

The Mormon Handcart Migration: "Tongue nor pen can never tell the sorrow" by Candy Moulton

Terror on the Santa Fe Trail: Kit Carson and the Jicarilla Apache by Doug Hocking

WINNER

The Last Sovereigns by Robert M. Utley

FINALISTS:

Beneath the Backbone of the World by Ryan Hall

South to Freedom by Alice L. Baumgartner

WINNER:

Cheyenne Summer: the Battle of Beecher Island: a history by Terry Mort

FINALISTS:

War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American invasion by Jeff Guinn

Iron Women: the ladies who helped build the railroad by Chris Enss

WINNER: Saving Yellowstone : Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America by Megan Kate Nelson

FINALISTS:

The Earth is All That Lasts : Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the Last Stand of the Great Sioux Nation by Mark Lee Gardner

The Widowed Ones : Beyond the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Christ Enss and Howard Kazanjian with Chris Kortlander

WINNER: Continental Reckoning : the American West in the Age of Expansion by Elliott West

FINALISTS:

The First Migrants : How Black Homesteaders' Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America's Great Migration by Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld

Fortune's Frenzy : a California Gold Rush Odyssey by Eilene Lyon

2010s

WINNER

Fort Laramie by Douglas C. McChristian

FINALISTS:

Dodge City: the early years, 1872-1886 by William B. Schillingberg

Crossing the Plains with Custer by Paul Horsted, Ernest Grafe & Jon Nelson

WINNER

The Killing of Crazy Horse by Thomas Powers

FINALISTS:

Beyond Bear's Paw by Jerome A. Green

So Rugged and Mountainous by Will Bagley

WINNER

The Mormon Rebellion by David L. Bigler and Will Bagley

FINALISTS:

After Custer by Paul L. Hedren

Railroaded by Richard White

WINNER

With Golden Visions Bright Before Them: trails to the mining West, 1849-1852 by Will Bagley

FINALISTS:

Terrible Justice: Sioux Chiefs and U.S. Soldiers on the Upper Missouri, 1954-1868 by Doreen Chaky

Deliverance from the Little Big Horn: Doctor Henry Porter and Custer's Seventh Cavalry by Joan Nabseth Stevenson

WINNER

Shot All to Hell: Jesse James, the Northfield Raid, and the Wild West's Greatest Escape by Mark Lee Gardner

FINALISTS:

Shooting Arrows and Slinging Mud: Custer, the press and the Little Bighorn by James E. Mueller

The Heart of Everything That Is: the untold story of Red Cloud, and American legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin

WINNER

American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 by Jerome A. Greene

FINALISTS:

Chasing the Santa Fe Ring: power and privilege in Territorial New Mexico by David L. Caffey

South Pass: gateway to a continent by Will Bagley

WINNER

William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest by William Heath

FINALISTS:

The Oregon Trail: a New American journey by Rinker Buck

Ladies of the Canyons: a league of extraordinary women and their adventures in the American Southwest by Lesley Poling-Kempes

WINNER

The Apache Wars: the hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the captive boy who started the longest war in American history by Paul Andrew Hutton

FINALISTS:

American Serengeti: the last big animals of the Great Plains by Dan Flores

The Earth is Weeping: the epic story of the Indian Wars for the American West by Peter Cozzens

WINNER

Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

FINALISTS:

Cattle Kingdom: the hidden history of the Cowboy West by Christopher Knowlton

Provisions of the Fur Trade: the encyclopedia of trade goods, Vol. 6 by James A. Hanson

WINNER

Native but Foreign: indigenous immigrants and refugees in the North American borderlands by Brenden W. Rensink

FINALISTS:

Bonanza King: John Mackay and the battle over the greatest riches in the American West by Gregory Crouch

West Like Lightning: the brief, legendary ride of the Pony Express by Jim DeFelice

2000s

WINNER

Creating Minnesota by Annette Atkins

WINNER