The open range cattle era lasted barely a quarter-century, but it left America irrevocably changed. These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades.

Cattle Kingdom reveals the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We venture from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakota Badlands to the Chicago stockyards. We meet a diverse array of players--from the expert cowboy Teddy Blue to the failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. Knowlton shows us how they and others like them could achieve so many outsized feats: killing millions of bison in a decade, building the first opera house on the open range, driving cattle by the thousand, and much more.Cattle Kingdomis a revelatory new view of the Old West.

The junipers that fill these pages are not the landscaping shrubs that color many suburban lit. What you'll find here are, instead, the native junipers that grow across millions of acres - one of the iconic plants of the American West. When Kristen Rogers-Iverson realized that junipers had secured a place in her consciousness, she set about exploring the stories, meanings, and multiple perspectives that interweave through the history and natural history of the tree. She discovered its prominent place in ecosystems and human lives over millennia. Junipers have warmed, sheltered, healed, and fed the humans who have lived among the trees, acquiring a supernatural mystique expressed in myths and tales. The juniper has played a key role in the American West as part of a web that is intricately connected with other plans and animals in the pinyon-juniper woodlands, overlapping much as the scalelike leaves of the Utah juniper do. Learning about juniper is one way to explore the wonders we love among; its shaggy bark and pale blue berries are as much a part of the landscape as jays or jackrabbits, sagebrush or Apache plume, and Colorado Plateau or Great Basin vistas. Learn about ghost beads and spiral grain, packrat middens and wildfire, spirituality and folklore, charcoal and gin, as well as biotic communities, tree life cycles, wilderness, and land management policies. Interwoven's exploration of junipers will enrich your appreciation for the trees and your experience of the natural world.

Please try to buy your copy at Bright Side Bookshop on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

In the final decade of the twentieth century, the American West was at war. Battle lines had hardened, with environmentalists squarely on one side of the fence, and ranchers on the other. By the mid-1990s, debates over the region’s damaged land had devolved into political wrangling, bitter lawsuits, and even death-threats. Conventional wisdom told us those who wanted to work the land and those who wanted to protect it had fundamentally different—and irreconcilable—values.

In Revolution on the Range, Courtney White challenges that truism, heralding stories from a new American West where cattle and conservation go hand in hand. He argues that ranchers and environmentalists have more in common than they’ve typically admitted: a love of wildlife, a deep respect for nature, and a strong allergic reaction to suburbanization. The real conflict has not been over ethics, but approaches. Today, a new brand of ranching is bridging the divide by mimicking nature while still turning a profit.

Westerners are literally reinventing the ranch by confronting their own assumptions about nature, profitability, and each other. Ranchers are learning that new ideas can actually help preserve traditional lifestyles. Environmentalists are learning that protected landscapes aren’t always healthier than working ones. White, a self-proclaimed middle-class city boy, has learned there’s more to ranching than grit and cowboy boots.

The author’s own transformation from conflict-oriented environmentalist to radical centrist mirrors the change sweeping the region. As ranchers and environmentalists find common cause, they’re discovering new ways to live on—and preserve—the land they both love. Revolution on the Range is the story of that journey, and a heartening vision of the new American West.

Please try to buy your copy at Bright Side Bookshop on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

A strikingly original debut from a tremendous new talent, Robert Moor explores how trails help us understand the world, from invisible ant trails to hiking paths that span continents and oceans, from migration routes to the Internet.

For seven years Moor travelled the globe, exploring trails of all kinds. He learned the tricks of master trail-builders, hunted down long-lost Cherokee trails, and traced the origins of our road networks. Moor interweaves his adventures with findings from science, history, philosophy, and nature writing in every chapter.

This deep search for meaning introduces the reader to experts who work with trails of all kinds, outrageous anecdotes from his own experiences and spectacular descriptions of landscapes and animal behaviour. On Trails gives an eye-opening tour, leaving us with a much richer, prismatic take on what we constantly take for granted: how we get where we're going.

Please try to buy your copy at Bright Side Bookshop on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

WE'RE READING THIS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE MOUNTAIN & PRAIRIE PODCAST BOOK CLUB! CLICK HERE TO JOIN THEIR DISCUSSION.

On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in the blink of an eye. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men  —  college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps  —  to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them.

Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen. The robber barons fought Roosevelt and Pinchot’s rangers, but the Big Burn saved the forests even as it destroyed them: the heroism shown by the rangers turned public opinion permanently in their favor and became the creation myth that drove the Forest Service, with consequences still felt in the way our national lands are protected  —  or not —  today.

Please try to buy your copy at Bright Side Bookshop on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

Now, for the first time in paperback, here is the remarkable story of Sandra Day O’Connor’s family and early life, her journey to adulthood in the American Southwest that helped make her the woman she is today—the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and one of the most powerful women in America. In this illuminating and unusual book, Sandra Day O’Connor tells, with her brother, Alan, the story of the Day family, and of growing up on the harsh yet beautiful land of the Lazy B ranch in Arizona.

Laced throughout these stories about three generations of the Day family, and everyday life on the Lazy B, are the lessons Sandra and Alan learned about the world, self-reliance, and survival, and how the land, people, and values of the Lazy B shaped them. This fascinating glimpse of life in the Southwest in the last century recounts an important time in American history, and provides an enduring portrait of an independent young woman on the brink of becoming one of the most prominent figures in America.

Please try to buy your copy at Bright Side Bookshop on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

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. The Great Plains with its wildlife intact dazzled Americans and Europeans alike, prompting numerous literary tributes. American Serengeti takes its place alongside these celebratory works, showing us the grazers and predators of the plains against the vast opalescent distances, the blue mountains shimmering on the horizon, the great rippling tracts of yellowed grasslands. Far from the empty "flyover country" of recent times, this landscape is alive with a complex ecology at least 20,000 years old--a continental patrimony whose wonders may not be entirely lost, as recent efforts hold out hope of partial restoration of these historic species.

Written by an author who has done breakthrough work on the histories of several of these animals--including bison, wild horses, and coyotes--American Serengeti is as rigorous in its research as it is intimate in its sense of wonder--the most deeply informed, closely observed view we have of the Great Plains' wild heritage.

Please try to buy your copy at Bright Side Bookshop on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

Writing of hermits, cowboys, changing seasons, and the wind, Ehrlich draws us into her personal relationship with this "planet of Wyoming" she has come to call home. She captures the incredible beauty and the demanding harshness of natural forces in these remote reaches of the West, and the depth, tenderness and humor of the quirky souls who live there.

Ehrlich, a former filmmaker and urbanite, presents in these essays a fresh and vibrant tribute to the new life she has chosen.

Please try to buy your copy at Bright Side Bookshop on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

The American West of the 1930s and 1940s was still a place of prospectors, cowboys, ranchers, and mountaineers, one that demanded backbreaking, lonely, and dangerous work. Still, midcentury pioneers such as David Lavender remembered “not the cold and the cruel fatigue, but rather the multitude of tiny things which in their sum make up the elemental poetry of rock and ice and snow.” And as the nation exhausted its gold and silver veins, as law reached the boomtowns on the frontier, and as the era of the great cattle ranches and drives came to an end, Lavender felt compelled to document his experiences in rugged southwest Colorado to preserve this rapidly disappearing way of life. One Man’s West is Lavender’s ode to his days on the Continental Divide and the story of his experiences making a living in the not so wild but not yet tamed West. Like stories told around a campfire, One Man’s West is captivating yet conversational, incredible yet realistic, and introduces some of the most charming characters in western literature.

Please try to buy your copy at Bright Side Bookshop on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to hunt for a wild buffalo, or American bison, in the Alaskan wilderness. Despite the odds—there’s only a 2 percent chance of drawing the permit, and fewer than 20 percent of those hunters are successful—Rinella managed to kill a buffalo on a snow-covered mountainside and then raft the meat back to civilization while being trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia. Throughout these adventures, Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000 years’ worth of buffalo hunters in North America, as well as the buffalo’s place in the American experience. At the time of the Revolutionary War, North America was home to approximately 40 million buffalo, the largest herd of big mammals on the planet, but by the mid-1890s only a few hundred remained. Now that the buffalo is on the verge of a dramatic ecological recovery across the West, Americans are faced with the challenge of how, and if, we can dare to share our land with a beast that is the embodiment of the American wilderness. 

Rinella’s erudition and exuberance, combined with his gift for storytelling, make him the perfect guide for a book that combines outdoor adventure with a quirky blend of facts and observations about history, biology, and the natural world. Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.

Please try to buy your copy at Bright Side Bookshop on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

The time is 1883, the place is the Texas Panhandle. Cowboys refuse to be stigmatized as drinkers and exploited by the wealthy cattle owners who don't pay liveable wages. Those very same ranchers want to take away the cowboys' right to own cattle because this ownership, the ranchers believe, would lead to thieving. So, in 1883, the dictum is set: If you're a cowboy, you can't own a cow. When rumors of such legislation travel from wagon to wagon, the cowboys decided to rally and fight for their rights--they gather together and strike.

When big syndicates moved into the Texas Panhandle, they fenced in the open range and replaced tradition and trust with written rules of employment until the cowboys had finally had enough. The cowboys of the Canadian River country went on strike against the big ranches. Listed as one of the Best Western Novels of all time.

Please try to buy your copy at Bright Side Bookshop on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

Many of the men and women doing today’s most consequential environmental work—restoring America’s grasslands, wildlife, soil, rivers, wetlands, and oceans—would not call themselves environmentalists; they would be too uneasy with the connotations of that word. What drives them is their deep love of the land: the iconic terrain where explorers and cowboys, pioneers and riverboat captains forged the American identity. They feel a moral responsibility to preserve this heritage and natural wealth, to ensure that their families and communities will continue to thrive.

Unfolding as a journey down the Mississippi River, Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman tells the stories of five representatives of this stewardship movement: a Montana rancher, a Kansas farmer, a Mississippi riverman, a Louisiana shrimper, and a Gulf fisherman. In exploring their work and family histories and the essential geographies they protect, Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman challenges pervasive and powerful myths about American and environmental values.

Please try to buy your copy at Bright Side Bookshop on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

This book is 'paired' with our September movie: Ridin' for the Brand. We hope to see you at the movie night on Tuesday, September 19 from 6:00-8:00 at the The Offices of Gail D. Lowe, CPA, 1600 West University Ave.

A Providence Journal Best Book of the Year

In 1977, Laura Bell left her family home in Kentucky for a wild and unexpected adventure: herding sheep in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin. The only woman in a man's world, she nevertheless found a home among the strange community of drunks and eccentrics, as well as a shared passion for a life of solitude and hard work. By turns cattle rancher, forest ranger, outfitter, masseuse, wife and mother, Bell vividly recounts her struggle to find solid earth in a memoir that's as breathtaking as it is singular.

Please try to buy your copy at Bright Side Bookshop on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

This book is 'paired' with our August movie: Hanna Ranch. We hope to see you at the movie night on Tuesday, August 22 from 6:00-8:00 at the The Offices of Gail D. Lowe, CPA, 1600 West University Ave.

In November, countless families across Texas head out for the annual deer hunt, a ritual that spans generations, ethnicities, socioeconomics, and gender as perhaps no other cultural experience in the state. Rick Bass's family has returned to the same hardscrabble piece of land in the Hill Country—"the Deer Pasture"—for more than seventy-five years. In A Thousand Deer, Bass walks the Deer Pasture again in memory and stories, tallying up what hunting there has taught him about our need for wildness and wilderness, about cycles in nature and in the life of a family, and particularly about how important it is for children to live in the natural world.

The arc of A Thousand Deer spans from Bass's boyhood in the suburbs of Houston, where he searched for anything rank or fecund in the little oxbow swamps and pockets of woods along Buffalo Bayou, to his commitment to providing his children in Montana the same opportunity—a life afield—that his parents gave him in Texas. Inevitably this brings him back to the Deer Pasture and the passing of seasons and generations he has experienced there. Bass lyrically describes his own passage from young manhood, when the urge to hunt was something primal, to mature adulthood and the waning of the urge to take an animal, his commitment to the hunt evolving into a commitment to family and to the last wild places.

Please try to buy your copy at Bright Side Bookshop on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

This book is 'paired' with our July movie: On the Wild Edge. We hope to see you at the movie night on Tuesday, July 18 from 6:00-8:00 at the The Offices of Gail D. Lowe, CPA, 1600 West University Ave.

Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take “us on a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert). Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices.

Bestselling winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize.

Set in the late nineteenth century, Lonesome Dove is the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Montana -- and much more. It is a drive that represents for everybody involved not only a daring, even a foolhardy, adventure, but a part of the American Dream -- the attempt to carve out of the last remaining wilderness a new life.

Augustus McCrae and W. F. Call are former Texas Rangers, partners and friends who have shared hardship and danger together without ever quite understanding (or wanting to understand) each other's deepest emotions. Gus is the romantic, a reluctant rancher who has a way with women and the sense to leave well enough alone. Call is a driven, demanding man, a natural authority figure with no patience for weaknesses, and not many of his own. He is obsessed with the dream of creating his own empire, and with the need to conceal a secret sorrow of his own. The two men could hardly be more different, but both are tough, redoubtable fighters who have learned to count on each other, if nothing else.

Join us for our April book club meeting! Our book for this month is 'Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,' by Wallace Stegner.

"In this book Wallace Stegner recounts the successes and frustrations of John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of Indian tribes of the American Southwest. A prophet without honor who had a profound understanding of the American West, Powell warned long ago of the dangers economic exploitation would pose to the West and spent a good deal of his life overcoming Washington politics in getting his message across. Only now, we may recognize just how accurate a prophet he was."

Book Club: The Rites of Autumn

Join us for our March book club meeting!

Our book for this month is 'The Rites of Autumn,' by Dan O'Brien. This is our second time reading a book by Dan O'Brien!

"In 1986 Dan O'Brien spent the summer in the Rocky Mountains releasing young peregrine falcons on the cliffs. When one of his release sites was raided by a golden eagle, he managed to save a peregrine chick and decided to make an improbable two-thousand-mile trip with her from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, following the avian autumnal migration. His retention was to teach the bird to hunt as a wild falcon would, in the hopes of releasing her into the natural world. Along the way he was forced to confront the chasm that gulfs wildness and domesticity -- and the difficulty in finding an even tenuous balance between them."

This book was chosen to pair with our March Day on the Land, a field trip to the Vermilion Cliffs on March 25th to see the condors and speak with the researchers up there about their work with 'big birds' and the challenges they face in the Southwest.

Please try to buy your copy at Barefoot Cowgirl Books, on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books! Other locations that might have it are the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library or Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

Join us for our February book club meeting! Our book for this month is 'Soldier Sister, Fly Home,' by Nancy Bo Flood. Nancy Bo Flood will be joining us for this meeting!

Please try to buy your copy at Barefoot Cowgirl Books, on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books!

Learn more about the book:
• https://randomlyreading.blogspot.com/2016/08/soldier-sister-fly-home-by-nancy-bo.html
• https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0750/0101/files/soldier-sister-reading-group-guide.pdf?11161331547405599512
• http://www.thepiratetree.com/2016/09/29/nancy-bo-flood-on-soldier-sister-fly-home/

Join us for our January book club meeting! Our book for this month is 'Holding the Line,' by Barbara Kingsolver. Please try to buy your copy at Barefoot Cowgirl Books, on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books!

http://www.diablotrust.org/calendar/janbook17

Learn more about the book:
• http://www.kingsolver.com/books/holding-the-line-women-in-the-great-arizona-mine-strike.html
• http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100439630
• http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/18/specials/kingsolver-holding.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_copper_mine_strike_of_1983

Join us for our December book club meeting! Our book for this month is 'This House of Sky,' by Ivan Doig. Please try to buy your copy at Barefoot Cowgirl Books, on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books!

Learn more about the book & author:
• http://www.ivandoig.com/houses.html
• https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ivan-doig-2/this-house-of-sky-landscapes-of-a-western-mind/
• http://www.nationalbook.org/bookchanged_idoig.html#.WDW_8qIrLIE

Join us for our November book club meeting! Our book for this month is 'Coyote America,' by Dan Flores. Please buy your copy at Barefoot Cowgirl Books, on San Francisco Street in downtown Flagstaff - all Diablo Trust Book Club members get 10% off book club books!

Learn more about the book and author:

• 'Coyote America' Honors An Animal Making North America Home For Centuries (NPR)
• Coyote America (The New Yorker)
• How the Most Hated Animal in America Outwitted Us All (National Geographic)