This page showcases books about Wallowa County. For staff recommendations, click the category in the menu. Items are available for shipping or in-store pickup. To order all other books online, you can click the “shop” button in our menu and order through our affiliate bookshop.org.
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Sale!Ranch wife, cow camp cook, photo-journalist, and amateur historian Janie Tippett writes of her thirty-one years of newspaper columns chronicling the lives of cattle ranchers and hay farmers in the remote hills of rural northeast Oregon. Includes all 6 volumes, from 1984 - 2015.
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Organized both chronologically and thematically, "Encounters with the People" is an edited, annotated compilation of unique primary sources related to Nez Perce history--Native American oral histories, diary excerpts, military reports, maps, and more. Generous elders shared their collective memory of carefully-guarded stories passed down through multiple generations, beginning with early Nimiipuu/Euro-American contact and extending until just after the Treaty of 1855 held at Walla Walla.
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Is there any chapter in American history more dramatic than that of the Northwest from the time of Lewis and Clark to the tragic defeat of Chief Joseph in 1877? Heroic- and not so heroic - characters abound: explorers, fur traders, miners, settlers, missionaries, ranchers, Indian chiefs and their tribespeople. Now, when interest in Lewis and Clark and the American Northwest has never been higher, come the first complete and unabridged paperback edition of Alvin Josephy's masterwork.
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Walter Brennan (1894-1974) was one of the greatest character actors in Hollywood history. He won three Academy Awards and became a national icon starring as Grandpa in The Real McCoys. He appeared in over two hundred motion pictures and became the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting, which celebrated the actor's unique role as the voice of the American Western. His life journey from Swampscott, Massachusetts, to Hollywood, to a twelve thousand-acre cattle ranch in Joseph, Oregon, is one of the great American stories. In the first biography of this epic figure, Carl Rollyson reveals Brennan's consummate mastery of virtually every kind of role while playing against and often stealing scenes from such stars as Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne. Rollyson fully explores Brennan's work with Hollywood's greatest directors, such as Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Fritz Lang. As a father and grandfather, Brennan instilled generations of his family with an outlook on the American Dream that remains a sustaining feature of their lives today. His conservative politics, which grew out of his New England upbringing and his devout Catholicism, receive meticulous attention and a balanced assessment in A Real American Character. Written with the full cooperation of the Brennan family and drawing on material in archives from every region of the United States, this new biography presents an artist and family man who lived and breathed an American idealism that made him the Real McCoy.
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This unique collection of stories reveal memories of first- and second- generation descendants of families who migrated in the 1920s through the 1950s from the Jim Crow South to Maxville, a remote company railroad logging town in Wallowa County. The stories are bolstered by the 200 + photographs from the families and from local historical collections.
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Lucullus V. McWhorter devoted much of his life to preserving the history of the Nez Perce and Yakama Indians of the Pacific Northwest's interior plateau region. McWhorter held a unique role as Nez Perce tribal historian and gatherer of tradition lore from both treaty and non-treaty bands. In Voice of the Old Wolf, Steve Evans helps to fill a gap in Nez Perce history, focusing on the 1880s to the 1940s, a period often neglected by the many historians of the 1877 war.
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Missionary Henry Spalding shipped two barrels of "Indian curiosities"--exquisite Nez Perce shirts, dresses, baskets, and horse regalia--to Dr. Dudley Allen in 1847. Donated to Oberlin College in 1893 and transferred to the Ohio Historical Society (OHS) in 1942, the collection languished in storage until Nez Perce National Historic Park curators rediscovered it in 1976. The OHS loaned most of the artifacts to the National Park Service. Twelve years later, the OHS abruptly recalled the collection, demanding the full appraised value of $608,100. Given just six-months to raise the funds, the tribe mounted a brilliant grassroots campaign. One day before the deadline, they met their goal. The author draws on interviews with Nez Perce experts and extensive archival research to tell the fascinating Spalding-Allen Collection story. He also examines the ethics of acquiring, bartering, owning, and selling Native cultural history.
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Although the Nez Perce (Nee-Me-Poo) Indians gave instrumental help to Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition, they were rewarded by decades of invasive treaties and encroachment upon their homeland. In June 1877, the Nez Perce struck back and were soon swept into one of the most devastating Indian wars in American history. The conflict culminated in an epic twelve-hundred-mile chase as the U.S. Army pursued some eight hundred Nez Perce men, women, and children, who tried to fight their way to freedom in Canada. In this enthralling account of the Nez Perce War, Bruce Hampton brings to life unforgettable characters from both sides of the conflictwarriors and women, common soldiers and celebrated generals. Looking Glass, White Bird, the legendary Chief Joseph, and fewer than three hundred warriors waged a bloody guerilla war against a modernized American army commanded by such famous generals as William Tecumseh Sherman, Nelson Miles, Oliver Otis Howard, and Philip Sheridan. Hampton also gives voice to the Native Americans from other tribes who helped the U.S. Army block the escape of the Nez Perce to Canada. Using authoritative sources, Hampton, a Native American history scholar, presents an objective account of the Nez Perce war and offers a glimpse into the lives of the Indians struggling to maintain their homeland and way of life. Prior to 1877, the Nez Perce were a peaceful and wealthy band. Misled by the white man's promises and faced with encroachment, a renegade band massacred 18 settlers. Fearing retribution, over 750 Nez Perce Indians began their flight toward Canada, followed by several army regiments. This war would eventually last several weeks, cover 1200 miles through three states, involve numerous battles, cost over $930,000, and result in the loss of many lives before the Indians would be forced to surrender only miles from their destination.