THIS volume collects three works by Western American research historian Dale L. Morgan. In the broad field of Americana, Morgan has acquired almost a cult following among the historically minded. Partly because he may be regarded as the last great amateur historian of the West, partly because his research was so thorough, partly because the period and resources in which he did his research and on which he chose to write inform so many other areas, the work of Dale L. Morgan is still cited in virtually any writing involving the early American West.

As a researcher and writer, Morgan’s...

DALE L. Morgan (1914–1971) is chiefly remembered for seminal studies on the American fur trade and central-route overland trail. Between 1943 and his death in 1971, Morgan produced some of the best-documented, most lucid, and readable narratives of the early American West. However, Morgan’s wide-ranging historical interests included virtually every topic intersecting his subject of the moment. He explained to John Caughey of Pacific Historical Review that his investigation of Indian policy was “one of the byproducts of the researches I have carried on in Mormon history during the past ten years.”¹ Each of the works collected here was...

THE works of Dale Morgan collected in this volume not only document the history of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs, but two decades of transition in Shoshone life. By 1849, the Shoshones, or Newe (pronounced ney-wa), had already undergone immense social, political, and economic change. Contact with European livestock, goods, diseases, and eventually, the colonizers themselves, revolutionized Newe life, but change did not erase older ways. Along with the large and more politically cohesive mounted buffalo-hunting bands, there coexisted smaller foot-going groups that seemingly had little interest in adopting the equestrian lifestyle. The Newe world in the mid-nineteenth century...

AS virtually the first step taken for the extension of government into the territory acquired in the Mexican cession, late in March, 1849, President Zachary Taylor directed that the Indian agencies for the Upper Missouri and Council Bluffs be transferred to Santa Fe and Salt Lake. On April 7, John Wilson of Missouri was notified of his appointment to the Salt Lake agency, and James S. Calhoun, of Georgia, to the Santa Fe agency, at salaries of $1,500 per year.¹

Various motives may have attended these appointments—the routine expansion of government administration into a political vacuum; a first effort...

THE record of emigration across Nevada has a persistent local violence which, in its day, gave the California newspapers a sufficiency of reports of “Indian Outrages on the Plains,” and which, in our own time, has survived somewhat gaudily in tradition and the reminiscences and journals of the overland travelers. Between City of Rocks and the Sierra Nevada the warfare was intermittent but desperate through more than a decade, and it had an historic climax in the Paiute war of 1860.^[1]

Intervention by the Office of Indian Affairs, and the activity of its agents among the Nevada Indians during this...

SCARCELY a beginning has been made in reconstructing the history of the Shoshoni. Grace Raymond Hebard in two biographies, Sacajawea and Washakie, dealt with the two most famous figures of Shoshoni history, and published incidentally a good deal of information about the history of the tribe, but conscientious as was Dr. Hebard’s work, her books are merely suggestive of the riches that await a serious student of the Shoshoni. The same may be said of the few ethnological studies that have so far appeared. No one has yet undertaken a serious investigation of Shoshoni contacts with the Spanish frontier, a...