As Big as the West

Granville Stuart (1834-1918) is a quintessential Western figure, a man whose adventures rival those of Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, or Sitting Bull, and who embodied many of the contradictions of America’s westward expansion. Stuart collected guns, herded cattle, mined for gold, and killed men he thought outlaws. But he also taught himself Shoshone, French, and Spanish, denounced formal religion, married a Shoshone woman, and eventually became a United States diplomat. In this fascinating biography, Clyde Milner and Carol O’Connor trace Stuart’s remarkable trajectory from his youth in an Iowa agricultural settlement to a mining camp in Gold Rush California to his rough-and-tumble life in Montana and his rise to prominence as a public figure.