About this item
Winner of the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize America's Great Plains once possessed one of the grandest wildlife spectacles of the world, equaled only by such places as the Serengeti, the Masai Mara, or the veld of South Africa. Pronghorn antelope, gray wolves, bison, coyotes, wild horses, and grizzly bears: less than two hundred years ago these creatures existed in such abundance that John James Audubon was moved to write, "it is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals."In a work that is at once a lyrical evocation of that lost splendor and a detailed natural history of these charismatic species of the historic Great Plains, veteran naturalist and outdoorsman Dan Flores draws a vivid portrait of each of these animals in their glory -- and tells the harrowing story of what happened to them at the hands of market hunters and ranchers and ultimately a federal killing program in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
About the Author
I'm a writer and former professor, born and raised in Louisiana but a resident of the American West - West Texas, Montana, now the Santa Fe area of Northern New Mexico - for more than 35 years. I spent most of my university career at the University of Montana in Missoula, where I was A. B. Hammond Professor of the History of the American West. A writing career that has so far produced ten books started with a major book on western exploration, followed by one on Indian traders in the Southwest. I went on to write several creative nonfiction and historical books about places in the American West, from the Llano Estacado and the Near Southwest to the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains. Along the way I also wrote a book on the artists and photographers of the Northern Rocky Mountains, and teamed up with artist Amy Winton for a book of my photographs and her pastels of the canyons of West Texas. More recently, with my Amazon Bestseller, American Serengeti, and my New York Times Bestseller, Coyote America - both books published in 2016 - my focus has been nature writing and the "biographies" of animals like bison, wolves, wild horses, and especially the epic story of North America's fascinating and now most widespread small wolf, the coyote. My articles and essays on the environment, art, and culture of the West have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Texas Monthly, Orion, New Mexico Magazine, Wild West, Southwest Art, High Country News, and The Big Sky Journal, for which I wrote a column, "Images of the American West," for eight years. My books and articles have been honored by the PEN America Literary Awards, the Western Writers of America, the Western History Association, the Western Heritage Center, the Center for Great Plains Studies, the High Plains Book Awards, the Montana Book Awards, the Oklahoma Book Awards, the Denver Public Library, the Montana Historical Society, the Texas State Historical Association, and the University of Oklahoma Press.
