93 Books Like Commerce of the Prairies

Dary set out to tell the whole story in easily accessible language introducing the student to a wide range of excitement on this trail that built America and made it great. From 1830 until the Civil War, the United States had no national bank and relied on the silver dollars brought from Mexico over the trail as its currency. Fortunes were made and lost and Missouri, the terminus of the trail, became powerful.

This is a collection of articles including some by Marc Simmons, Gardner’s mentor and frequent writing partner. The pair are the greatest experts on the trail to be found. If you can locate a copy, its articles provide a broad perspective on where Santa Fe Trail research has taken us in recent years by people who love the trail and its peoples.

Dr. Willard traveled the trail in the 1820s. He met Hugh Glass, the Revenant as Hollywood named him, and inspected his wounds. Willard brought medicine to New Mexico and Mexico where the Catholic church had made life difficult for doctors. He describes the treatments he used and it’s truly remarkable that any of his patients survived.

Teenaged and highly observant Susan spent her honeymoon on the Santa Fe Trail with her husband a Santa Fe trader as they accompanied the Army of the West on its invasion of Mexico. She provides a woman’s perspective and much more. At a time when very few women have trailed to New Mexico, Susan wrote of the amazing things she encountered giving us a woman’s perspective. 

First published in 1939, The Old Santa Fe Trail was written under the pen name of Stanley Vestal by college professor Walter S. Campbell. The author was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. His book is a wealth of knowledge about the 200-year-old trading route from Missouri-Westport to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The author/professor turned a textbook subject into a readable and enjoyable story. The 900-mile route would become Route 66 around the time of Campbell’s death in 1957. His stories of those that used the trail; like William Becknell, Kit Carson, and Jim Bridger kept my attention. The 27-page appendix with index and bibliography was immensely helpful in my research for my book.   

This dual-biography has the best description of Custer’s death ever written. Of course, no one knows exactly what happened, and that sense of mystery is one of the reasons it has become part of American lore. But master historian Stephen Ambrose uses the available evidence to speculate in a few beautifully written paragraphs what brought Custer to his legendary defeat and how he might have reacted to it in his last moments. The comparative stories of Custer and Crazy Horse leading to the battle is a fast-paced tale that will make you keep turning pages, forgetting you know how it will end. But the book is more than fine writing. The dual-biography format is the perfect vehicle for Ambrose to explain the clash of cultures that led to tragic conflict.

Native Americans have played a strong role in my life over the decades, especially as teachers of wisdom.

Reading Medicine Woman for the first time, I immediately connected with Lynn’s Native American teachers, Agnes and Ruby and learned a great deal through her journey to find her inner power. Her teachers brought forth ancient knowledge by way of the sacred feminine which felt familiar to my heart and soul, familiar to my indigenous people, the Chaldeans, Neo-Babylonians who still speak Aramaic.

Each time I re-read this book, I find something new that speaks to me. 

Horse stealing was more than theft of valuable and essential property. Matthew Luckett explains that on the Great Plains horse stealing “destabilized communities, institutions, nations, diplomatic relations, and cross-cultural exchange.” Luckett challenges many popular notions about horse thieves (for starters, they were not hung).  There were different kinds of horse theft and horse thieves. Don’t be misled by “Nebraska” in the title—this book shows that horse stealing had regional and national repercussions.   Luckett is an engaging writer, and this book is extremely readable and filled with compelling stories. I particularly recommend the chapter “The Horse Wars” about the role of horses in the war the U.S. Army waged against the Indians. 

For this book, Lajimodiere dedicated much time and effort over years to listen and record boarding school experiences of Native Americans, especially in the northern Plains, acknowledging different forms of schools that threatened Native American lives, families, and peoplehood. Her book encapsulates the voices of the survivors who testify of their struggles and those who did not survive the boarding school colonizing machine that sought to control Indigenous youth and their communities.

Lajimodiere epitomizes an activist scholar who has worked to trace as many Indian boarding schools in the United States as possible, and she has been foundational to the development of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition that is spearheading efforts for truth and healing from the adverse impacts and legacies of boarding schools.

I began to read this book in childhood because it was in our house (sent as a present from an Aunt living in America) and it intrigued me by the title and the illustrations of buffalos, coyotes, bears, the landscape, rivers, canyons, and the covered wagons in a circle with people and their belongings, bedding down by campfires under the starry skies […] The episodes easily captured my attention. Parkman is documenting the first settlers crossing the Mid-West Plains towards the Rockies. This is really ‘a page turner’ and classic of travelogue adventure, even though I had never heard the genre term ‘travelogue’ on first reading. It also reads like a fantasy and provides the reader who has never been to the United States with a longing to go there. Books are parallel to life and in this case for me, I did reach the Origen Trail, walked some of… show more.