Author Description

The classic account and history of the Taos Revolt and the Cheyenne Indians. In the bright morning of his youth, Lewis H. Garrard traveled into the wild and free Rocky Mountain West and left us this fresh and vigorous account, which, says A. B. Guthrie Jr., contains in its pages “the genuine article—the Indian, the trader, the mountain man, their dress, and behavior and speech and the country and climate they lived in.” On September 1, 1846, Garrard, then only seventeen years old, left Westport Landing (now Kansas City) with a caravan, under command of the famous trader Céran St. Vrain, bound for Bent’s Fort (Fort William) in the southeastern part of present-day Colorado. After a lengthy visit at the fort and in a camp of the Cheyenne Indians, early in 1847 he joined the little band of volunteers recruited by William Bent to avenge the death of his brother, Governor Charles Bent of Taos, killed in a bloody but brief Mexican and Indian uprising in that New Mexican pueblo. In fact, Garrard’s is the only eyewitness account we have of the trial and hanging of the “revolutionaries” at Taos. Many notable figures of the plains and mountains dot his pages: traders St. Vrain and the Bents; mountain men John L. Hatcher, Jim Beckwourth, Lucien B. Maxwell, Kit Carson, and others; various soldiery traveling to and from the outposts of the Mexican War; and explorer and writer George F. Ruxton. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work m