Sacagawea's Nickname: Essays on the American West

Explorers and martyrs, princes and poets, hucksters and scholars fill the pages of Larry McMurtry’s new book on the history and enduring yet ever-shifting myths of the American West. In twelve essays from The New York Review, he ranges from Lewis and Clark’s expedition on the Missouri River, where they immortalized Sacagawea in the Journals that McMurtry calls our first American epic, to John Wesley Powell’s on the Colorado, from the dispossession of the Five Civilized Tribes to the fascination of Zuni for a parade of unscrupulous anthropologists, from entertainers like Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley to pulp writers like Zane Grey. Once again Larry McMurtry casts a keen and elegaic eye not only on the often harsh truths of the West, but also on the power of western illusions, of what he calls “that other, endlessly imagined West, the West that can never be fully believed or wholly denied.” These essays combine the vivid character portraits, telling historical insights, dry humor, and narrative gifts that have made him our finest contemporary writer about the American West.