Here's a sampling of High Plains titles on Wyoming and the West: history, outlaws and lawmen, women, poetry, memoirs, and other perspectives of the West. For more information click on the image of the book.
Follow the Boys of Company K to Wyoming during the Civil War.
The inside story of the life of Butch Cassidy.
Poems that will change the way the world looks at women in ranching.
A side of the military you never read about the official U.S. Army Laundresses.
Did Tom Horn commit the murder of 14-year-old Willie Nickell for which he was hanged?
The story of the horse that became the symbol of Wyoming
Frontiersman Biography
A road trip for a cause...on a donkey.
Author Fern Nelson moved to Jackson, Wyoming, before she was a year old. She participated in much of the history of Jackson’s Hole and was acquainted with the early settlers. She had the presence of mind to interview Jackson’s Hole old-timers during the 1960s and 1970s when many of the first residents were still alive. Nelson’s stories of the incidents and individuals of Jackson’s Hole as it was, but will never be again, are sure to inform and entertain you.
There are stories that will make you laugh like the one of Joe Nethercott who came home to find his neighbors had turned his cabin logs into a church. There are stories that will make you cringe like the one of fourteen-year-old Mark Anderson who wouldn’t give up and die, so was carried on a stretcher from Jackson to Victor, Idaho, by four men on foot. Jackson’s Hole is a community unlike any other. A community with many stories to tell.
• 0-931271-25-8 • trade paper • index • 384 pp • photos • $16.95 ORDER NOW
“You will discover two things about Fern Nelson’s writing. One is that Fern wants everything she writes to be as accurate as she can possibly make it. The other is that Fern loves a good story. What a great combination. Enjoy.” •• Robert C. Rudd, former director, Jackson Hole Museum & Teton County Historical Center
Fern Knutsen Nelson came into the Jackson Hole Valley in the autumn of 1911 carried in her mother’s arms over the Teton Pass. Dorthy Knutsen did not trust that the wagon would not tip over on the steep trail. Fern’s father, Lou Knutsen, had just contracted to carry mail from the railroad end at Victor, Idaho, to Jackson, Wyoming; some twenty-six miles over the rugged Teton Range. He was moving his family from Driggs, Idaho to Jackson where they would make a new home. Fern’s earliest memories are of a ranch life in South Park, an area just south of the town of Jackson. She grew up with two brothers and three sisters; plenty of animals and wildlife, and lots of elbow room.
With her family, and later her husband Albert Nelson, Fern participated in most of the growth activities of the valley. She was a homesteader, rancher; helped her sister at arestaurant and motel operation; and helped her husband with his carpentry contracting business and his dude ranch and big game outfitting business.
In the 1950s and 1960s Fern compiled many profiles of original settlers of Jackson Hole which were published in the Jackson Hole Guide. She relied upon the first-hand information in the articles as the basis for her book.
Albert and Fern raised three children, a boy and two girls, who gave them eleven grandchildren, twenty-seven great grandchildren, and five great-great grandchildren before she passed away May 10, 2012, at age 101.