“Ingenious. A magnificent scholarly achievement. A sweeping new narrative account of [western] history. A book to ponder and plunder.”
—Virginia Scharff, Western Quarterly Review

“Not only well researched and presented but instantly absorbing.”
—Adrienne Caughfield, Journal of American History
 
Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of the Bancroft Prize—historical writing’s most prestigious award—Empires, Nations, and Families is an epic work of American History that fills in the blanks on the map of the American West between 1800 and 1860. Historian Anne F. Hyde—author of An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture and co-author (with William Deverell) of The West in the History of the Nation—tells a riveting true story of Native Americans, entrepreneurs, fur trappers and fur traders in a vibrant “wilderness” to which Daniel Boone himself was a Johnny-come-lately.