History of the American West

Related Resources

In American Memory

• Other Collections with a Focus on the American West
• Other Collections Illustrating the American Indian Experience

Other Online Resources at the Library of Congress

• Meeting of Frontiers

In American Memory

Other Collections with a Focus on the American West

"California as I Saw It": First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900

This collection consists of the full texts and illustrations of 190 works documenting the formative era of California's history through eyewitness accounts. It covers the dramatic decades between the Gold Rush and the turn of the twentieth century. It captures the pioneer experience; encounters between Anglo-Americans and the diverse peoples who had preceded them; the transformation of the land by mining, ranching, agriculture, and urban development; the often-turbulent growth of communities and cities; and California's emergence as both a state and a place of uniquely American dreams.

Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982

This collection presents documentation of a Nevada cattle-ranching community. It includes 41 motion pictures and 28 sound recordings that tell the story of life and work on the family-run Ninety-Six Ranch and of its cowboys, known in the region as buckaroos. Motion pictures produced from 1945 to 1965 by Leslie Stewart, owner of the Ninety-Six Ranch, are also included. An archive of 2,400 still photographs portrays the people, sites, and traditions on other ranches and in the larger community of Paradise Valley, home to persons of Anglo-American, Italian, German, Basque, Swiss, Northern Paiute Indian, and Chinese heritage.

The South Texas Border, 1900-1920: The Robert Runyon Photograph Collection

The Robert Runyon Photograph Collection of the South Texas Border Area, a collection of over 8,000 items, is a unique visual resource documenting the Lower Rio Grande Valley during the early 1900s. Donated by the Runyon family to the Center for American History in 1986, it includes glass negatives, lantern slides, nitrate negatives, prints, and postcards, representing the life's work of commercial photographer Robert Runyon (1881-1968), a longtime resident of South Texas. His photographs document the history and development of South Texas and the border, including the Mexican Revolution, the U.S. military presence at Fort Brown and along the border prior to and during World War I, and the growth and development of the Rio Grande Valley.

California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties
Music and Culture of the Northern Rio Grande: The Juan B. Rael Collection
Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941

These three collections present multi-format ethnographic field collections Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center.

Before and After the Great Earthquake and Fire: Early Films of San Francisco, 1897-1916

This collection consists of twenty-six films of San Francisco from before and after the Great Earthquake and Fire, 1897-1916. Seventeen of the films depict San Francisco and its environs before the 1906 disaster. Seven films describe the great earthquake and fire. The two later films include a 1915 travelogue that shows scenes of the rebuilt city and a tour of the Panama Pacific Exposition and a 1916 propaganda film.

Other Collections Illustrating the American Indian Experience

American Indians of the Pacific Northwest

This digital collection integrates over 2,300 photographs and 7,700 pages of text relating to the American Indians in two cultural areas of the Pacific Northwest, the Northwest Coast and Plateau. These resources illustrate many aspects of life and work, including housing, clothing, crafts, transportation, education, and employment. The materials are drawn from the extensive collections of the University of Washington Libraries, the Cheney Cowles Museum/Eastern Washington State Historical Society in Spokane, and the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle.

Omaha Indian Music

Omaha Indian Music features traditional Omaha music from the 1890s and 1980s. The multiformat ethnographic field collection contains 44 wax cylinder recordings collected by Francis La Flesche and Alice Cunningham Fletcher between 1895 and 1897, 323 songs and speeches from the 1983 Omaha harvest celebration pow-wow, and 25 songs and speeches from the 1985 Hethu'shka Society concert at the Library of Congress. Segments from interviews with members of the Omaha tribe conducted in 1983 and 1999 provide contextual information for the songs and speeches included in the collection. Supplementing the collection are black-and-white and color photographs taken during the 1983 pow-wow and the 1985 concert, as well as research materials that include fieldnotes and tape logs pertaining to the pow-wow.

Meeting of Frontiers

Meeting of Frontiers is a bilingual English-Russian collaboration. It tells the story of the American exploration and settlement of the West, the parallel exploration and settlement of Siberia and the Russian Far East, and the meeting of the Russian-American frontier in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. The narrative sections are illustrated and supplemented by digital reproductions of books, manuscripts, photographs, maps, sound recordings, and early movies. In the first phase of the project, these have been selected from the Library of Congress collections. Later phases will incorporate digitized content from partner institutions in Alaska and Russia.