To the novice of the fur trade era, this is a wonderful book. For the more experienced reader of this time period, it is a good review of the many names and places which shaped the early American West. Along with timely excerpts from a multitude of diaries, journals, narratives and books, the author also includes numerous maps, drawings and art work replications from the famous western painter Alfred Jacob Miller to depict these annual gatherings. The book is in a chronological time order, beginning with the first rendezvous of 1825 and culminating with the last event of its kind in 1840. It was as much a pleasure to read as I'm sure it would have been to experience these yearly social occasions.

This book has a collection of interesting bike rides of varying lengths and difficulties. All rides have information on point-to-point mileage, nearby attractions (including Dairy Queens for stops on the way), and terrain/difficulty. The routes are great (have ridden several already), but the maps are only good to a certain level of detail. Bring a street-level map (and maybe a compass) if you don't know the area. If you are a recreational biker in the Twin Cities, this is a must-have.

It is impossible to have a book describing every toprope route on Colorado's frontrange, Knapp does a pretty good job of sending the reader to a little bit of everything. The book seems to concentrate on the Denver/Golden area, especially CastleWood Canyon, but has enough of the other areas on the front range to make you want to buy a more detailed guidebook.

If you are new to climbing along the front range, this is a pretty good book to get you to the rock.

The primary accomplishment of this book is its 500+ page discussion of the Washington Cascades without mention of The Mountaineers club! The first 140 pages deal with indians, immigrant trails and the Hudson's Bay Company. Nothing new here, a lot of references to Winthrop's Canoe and Saddle and a discription of Ross' trip over Cascade Pass. The next seventy pages are about the first boundry survey fron 1857 - 1862. This is the guts of the book and it is really good - vintage Beckey. It's researched from original sources and well footnoted. The next sixty or seventy pages are basically about the railroads. These stories have been told before in more detai but the recounting is interesting with an attention to the geography that is usually overlooked. (Yakima Pass?) The third part of the book is a superficial presentation of mining in the Northwest, early mountaineering on the volcanoes and the beginnings of the forest service. None of these are done particularly well and none of them have enough detail to complement the first part of the book. This section does have a thirty page section on the USGS topographers and the second boundry survey in 1901 - 1908. It was during this era that many of the first ascents in the cascades were done but the discussion is brief and clearly omits the majority of what Beckey wrote about these efforts in the CAG series. Overall I have to say that I was disappointed. I understand that the Oregon Historical Society lacked the funds to publish and held it up for a long time but I started hearing about this book in the early '90s and saw a mock-up of it's cover at their booth at bookfest in about 1995. I got very excited reading the first part of the book but ended up feeling like Fred got tired about halfway through, or that he lost interest and just glossed over everything after the boundry survey. Read Woodhouse about mining. Read Molenar and Haines or Rusk on mountaineering. Read Beckey's own Challenge of the North Cascades and the introductions and footnotes in the Cascade Alpine Guide series. Read Bates Three Fingers to get a flavor of the early forest service era - and there are probably better sources for people interested in that topic (Even Beckey's CAG intros and notes have more information that this book does.) Read Tabor & Crowder Routes and Rocks about the geology. Read Roe and Praether about the railroads (again, also covered in CAG). Read Miles Kolma Kulshan about Mt. Baker. Finally, read Carlos Schwantes. His railroad discussion and his regional history are a lot better than Beckey's. But read Beckey about the boundry survey. There's nothing else like it.

One-dimensional characters. A flimsy plot that lacks the shading of true noir. Writing that is both trite and dull. While Mr. Leebron seems to have some skill, I'm afraid his writing is so mannered that even the most interesting premises fall flat.

While occasionally interesting, Out West suffers greatly from the fact that it never generates any real feelings or compassion/distaste towards the protagonists, by either the narrator or reader. Their relationship seems TV drama-stilted at best, and since story revolves exclusively around them, Leebron never builds momentum for what could have a been a semi-appealing story.

.... This novel is on the dark side--think film noir--but it is far from stereotypically so. The characters are compelling and complex, and the narrative, while not fast-paced, moves forward steadily, even inevitably, and certainly held my interest. This novel will be appreciated by anyone with a postmodern bent.

Casey Tefertiller who brought us a brilliant book on Wyatt Earp (The Life and Legend) in 1997 wrote an introduction to this book, knowing that it was written by two different people. Dodge was never undercover for Wells Fargo. There is not a shred of evidence of that. His widow said his Tombstone notes were burned so Lake faked the first half and now Tefertiller should have used terpentine to remove varnish and reveal truth. Another hoax a la .... Another demerit for a University Press.

I loved reading this book. I am not a western theme type reader and although I may be bias, it was a great book.

Written in the 1950's, this book displays a remarkable lack of research and fact. Read S.W. Harman's 'Hell on the Border' instead. The book reflects more about the time it was written than the the person it is describing.

I have found a few inaccuracies with some of the statistics and data in this book. I'm not sure if anyone edited the writing before it was published because there are whole sections that really have nothing to do with the topics.