The Oregon Trail
1849 · 951 pages
Twenty-three and fresh from Harvard, Parkman rode onto the 1846 prairie and spent three weeks hunting buffalo with an Oglala Sioux band. He got the West down before the railroads reached it.
★ 5.4
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Last of the Mohicans
1826 · 398 pages
The scout Hawkeye and the last two Mohicans guide two sisters through the French and Indian War. Cooper made the frontiersman a national hero, and the Western has lived off him since.
★ 5.5
1491
New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
2005 · 560 pages
The hemisphere Columbus reached held cities larger than Paris, an Amazon farmed into orchard, and forests burned into pasture on purpose. What later settlers took for wilderness was a continent emptied by epidemics.
★ 6.7
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
An Indian History of the American West
1970 · 487 pages
Thirty years of broken treaties, forced marches, and massacres, told from inside the Cheyenne, Navajo, Apache, and Lakota camps. Dee Brown ended the frontier myth for a generation of American readers.
★ 6.8
Death Comes for the Archbishop
1927 · 297 pages
Two French priests give their lives to a diocese in territorial New Mexico. Cather dissolves plot into landscape and legend, and their friendship carries decades of desert riding without a raised voice.
★ 7.0