The Grand Teton Reader

Description

Grand Teton National Park draws more than three million visitors annually in search of wildlife, outdoor adventure, solitude, and inspiration. This collection of writings showcases the park’s natural and human histories through stories of drama and beauty, tragedy and triumph.
 
Editor Robert Righter has selected thirty-five contributors whose work takes readers from the Tetons’ geological origins to the time of Euro-American encroachment and the park’s politically tumultuous creation. Selections range from Laine Thom’s Shoshone legend of the Snake River and Owen Wister’s essay “Great God! I’ve Just Killed a Bear,” to Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson’s humorous yet fearful account of crossing the Snake River, and William Owen’s first attempt to climb the Grand Teton. Conservationists, naturalists, and environmentalists are also represented: Terry Tempest Williams chronicles her multiyear encounter with her “Range of Memory,” and Olaus and Mardy Murie recount the difficulties of “park-making” in an often-hostile human environment.
Anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the park’s wild beauty and controversial past will want to read these stories by people who lived it. “Bob Righter has assembled a set of fascinating historical accounts of explorers, hunters and anglers, homesteaders, and dude ranchers whose lives played out on the sage-covered lands of Jackson Hole and the magnificent mountain range that lies within Grand Teton National Park. Supplemented with interesting images and a historical timeline, Righter’s anthology invites readers into a rich past of intriguing characters, natural scenes and wildlife, and special places within this gem of a national park and international treasure.”
—Mark Harvey, North Dakota State University, Fargo, and author of Wilderness Forever: Howard Zahniser and the Path to the Wilderness Act “The American West’s grandest landscape has to be the Teton Range and Jackson Hole, a special place that has long drawn high-caliber visitors, observers, and residents charmed by its attributes. Pulling together two centuries of gifted nature writing done in the shadow of these iconic peaks makes for one of the best place anthologies I’ve ever read. And who better to assemble these voices than prize-winning historian and long-time Tetons resident, Bob Righter?”
—Dan Flores, New York Times best-selling author of Coyote America and American Serengeti Robert W. Righter is professor emeritus at University of Texas, El Paso, and was professor of history at the University of Wyoming from 1973 to 1988. He is the author of Peaks, Politics, and Passion: Grand Teton National Park Comes of Age, among numerous others. Righter lives with his wife on the edge of Grand Teton National Park.

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