The William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies
and DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist
University
Announce a New Publication in the Library
of Texas Series
Edited by David Farmer and David J. Weber
Including illustrations from the 1892 Harper’s Weekly
A much-acclaimed reporter,
Richard Harding Davis had covered disasters and war, vice and crime for
Philadelphia and New York City dailies. Then, in 1892, he hopped a train in New
York, hoping to encounter the Wild West he had read so much about. What Davis
discovered instead was a more compelling story: a New West rising out the Old.
The reports that he sent back to Harper’s Weekly would form the basis of
his book, The West from a Car-Window.
Whether riding with the U. S. Army across arid south Texas brush country chasing a fugitive, bouncing on in a rickety stagecoach in boomer Oklahoma, or glad-handing his way through gilded Denver, Davis bore witness to the region’s startling growth. He could not know that what his keen eye and energetic prose captured in 1892 was the emerging foundation of the twentieth-century Western economy, which in time would make the region an urban and industrial powerhouse.
This beautiful new edition of The West from a Car-Window, the first since Davis’s classic text was published in 1892, contains all the original illustrative material, including the author’s black-and-white photographs and Frederick Remington’s striking drawings (including the drawing above), with two additional images that had accompanied the Harper’s Weekly articles. To orient the modern reader, this new edition contains a splendid introduction and annotations by Char Miller and an index, which the 1892 edition lacked.
A new
generation of readers will be thrilled to climb aboard the train with the
dashing author as he guides them across the vast and fascinating Western
landscape at turn of the twentieth century.
Char Miller, the editor of this volume, is a professor of History and director
of Urban Studies at Trinity University in San Antonio. Like Richard Harding
Davis, he is a keen observer of the American West and a prolific and vivid
writer. He is currently interested in American environmental history, and his
recent books include Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern
Environmentalism (2001), Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life
in South Texas (2005), and the forthcoming Ground Work: Essays in
American Environmental Culture.
Our edition is handsomely designed by Bradley Hutchinson, printed on
acid-free paper, and indexed. We have printed 500 copies, of which
450 are for sale. Our edition cannot be purchased through retail bookshops.
For details about ordering this book and others in the Library of Texas series,
please contact the Clements Center at 214-768-3684 or
swcenter@smu.edu.
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ORDER FORM
The West from a
Car-Window,
Edited by
Char Miller
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