The records dealing with the Buffalo Forge slaves are unique in their completeness; never before have details of this life in the American South been so rich, so exacting, and so accessible to historian and general reader alike. Historian Charles Dew’s exhaustive study of the Buffalo Forge asks - to use Charles Joyner's wonderful phrase - "large questions in small places"; he describes what working and living conditions were like for the slave artisans and their families, traces patterns of accommodation and resistance, and elucidates the complex interaction between white and black that constituted the inner core of the master-slave relationship.

Buffalo Forge was an extensive iron-making and fanning enterprise located approximately nine miles southeast of Lexington in the Valley of Virginia. This property was developed in the antebellum period by two men: William Weaver, a Pennsylvania entrepreneur who made his initial investment at Buffalo Forge during the War of 1812, and Daniel C. E. Brady, another Pennsylvanian and a relative of Weaver's whom Weaver brought down to the valley during the 1850s to assist him in managing the Buffalo Forge operations. By the time of the Civil War, Weaver had amassed an extraordinary estate which included a force of seventy owned slaves plus an additional force of as many as one hundred slaves hired annually, whom he employed in both iron-manufacturing and agricultural tasks. During the antebellum years, he operated two charcoal-fired blast furnaces and two well-equipped forges for the production of bar iron, and held over 20,000 acres of land scattered across three counties in the Valley.

Almost every job on the Buffalo Forge property, from the most highly skilled to the most ordinary, was performed by slave labor. The story of William Weaver's slaves is told through slave birth, illness, and death records kept assiduously by Weaver and later by Brady. The fortuitous survival of these documents is an invaluable addition to the history of slavery, allowing us a fully integrated, day-to-day look at the slave community's function and development. Weaver-Brady records describe the deadly progress of epidemics and crippling industrial accidents among their slave force; in noting all slave births, they permit the construction of detailed slave genealogies and reveal slave-naming practices. The Freedman's Bureau Marriage Register for the county in which Buffalo Forge was located also survives. This exceedingly valuable document reflects the effort by the bureau to encourage the freedmen to come in and record (and thereby legalize) marriages entered into while the husband and wife were still enslaved. Almost all of the Buffalo Forge black families are in this register, and many of the dates given by the former slaves can be confirmed by reference to records in the Weaver-Brady papers.

Another key item in the Weaver-Brady papers is the "Home Journal" kept by Daniel Brady from 1858 through 1865. This three-volume diary recounts what each industrial and agricultural slave laborer was doing at Buffalo Forge on every working day; Brady evaluates their performance, describes the movements of the slave patrols and whom they punished, and tells the story of the Civil War - how the slaves reacted when Federal troops entered the valley, and how the black men and women made the transition to freedom in the months following emancipation.

The documentary evidence dealing with the slaves of Buffalo Forge provides an extraordinary opportunity to reconstruct, from manuscript and oral history sources, the story of slave life as it was lived during the antebellum and Civil War years; these materials also offer a chance to trace the history of these men and their families into the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras. There is no other book quite like this in its massive and ambitious historiography of American slavery. Bond of Iron has a significance that far transcends the geographic confines of Buffalo Forge; it makes a distinct and genuine contribution toward understanding slavery, and slave life, in the American South.

Hard-back book measures ~6-3/8" by ~9-1/2" (portrait); ~1-3/8" thick; 429 pages, no tears or folds. Book and dust-jacket are in very-fine "NEW" condition.

They were the men and women, from both sides of the law, who used guns to blaze their way into the history books and American folklore. They were the gunfighters, a collection of whom is here presented in an exciting potpourri of periods and settings.

Whether you are a historian, gun aficionado, or are just interested in fact that reads like fiction, Guns and the Gunfighters will fascinate you. Witness the murder of James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok, shot in the back while playing poker in a Deadwood, South Dakota, saloon, holding "the dead man's hand" of aces and eights. Follow Special Investigator Frank Hammer on the trail of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, ending with their bloody demise on a logging road in Louisiana. More than thirty individuals are covered, with hundreds of illustrations. Some of those included are John Dillinger, "Public Enemy Number 1," and Belle Starr, "Queen of the Bandits," along with personalities not normally thought of as gunfighters - Sergeant Alvin York, who captured 132 German soldiers during World War I, and Winston Churchill, a veteran and prisoner during the Boer War who successfully escaped.

For the gun collector, Guns and the Gunfighters is a valuable reference source. A wide range of guns from various periods are examined in detail in seventeen sections placed following the biographies of the persons who used these weapons.

Guns profiled in the Dillinger arsenal, for example, are the Ortgies Auto Pistol and the Colt Army Special DA Revolver. Such profiles include history of manufacture and use, advantages of the weapon, specifications, and results of functional tests conducted by experts.

Many of the legends of the gunfighters, examples of America's often violent and lawless history, have been inaccurate and incomplete. Guns and the Gunfighters presents accurate accounts, proving that the true story is often more exciting than the myth.

Hard-back book measures roughly ~8-5/8" by ~11-3/8" (portrait); ~5/8" thick; 224 pages with more than 400 black-and-white photographs and illustrations; no tears or folds; binding fully intact; light shelf-scuffing and wear. Book and dust-jacket are in otherwise very-good to fine condition.

A fiery orator, a brilliant diplomat, a revolutionary thinker, a political and military genius, the man named Tecumseh became a legend among Native Americans and whites. He stood as a messiah to his people during one of the most crucial periods of their history, as the whites began to explore and expand to the west of the British colonies. Here five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee Allan W. Eckert tells the life story of this great leader as it has never been told before, with the meticulous accuracy of a scholar and the dramatic flair of a novelist. Mining sources of information never before utilized, Eckert fleshes out the details of a fascinating life and corrects the mistakes of previous accounts.

Tecumseh's was a life that did not lack in drama. Born in 1768 under the augury of a shooting star, Tecumseh ("The-Panther-Passing-Across") was the subject of prophecies from his adoptive father Chiungalla, his brother Chiksika, and the great Miami chief Michikiniqua. Proving himself a skilled hunter by the age of six, Tecumseh went on to be accorded warrior status at twelve an almost unheard-of honor. Commanding a remarkable amount of respect for a young man, at fifteen he took a stand against the torture and brutality Shawnee warriors inflicted upon whites and other prisoners and, with an eloquence far beyond his years, swayed older warriors to his cause. As the American forces planned a massive campaign to exterminate the Shawnee, the twenty-three-year-old Tecumseh repeatedly walked boldly through the streets of the settlement at Cincinnati - and within the walls of Fort Washington itself - to gather intelligence that led the Shawnee to win the greatest Indian victory in history Over any American military force. Though he did not belong to one of the ruling clans of the Shawnee, the visionary Tecumseh extended his power beyond tribal boundaries to become a leader among many Native American tribes, forming an unprecedented alliance against the white settlers and their government.

Although Tecumseh drew together perhaps the largest force ever commanded by a North American Indian, playing a decisive role in the capture of Detroit and of more than 2,000 U.S. soldiers during the War of 1812, his grand design for Native American unification was doomed to failure. One year later, the Shooting Star fell in battle, But the story does not end in defeat and death: The great warriors and statesmen of history are measured by the power of their charisma, the strength of their message, the boldness of their vision - and on that scale, Tecumseh's star burns as bright as ever.

In this epic work - utilizing more than 850 sources - Eckert weaves a compelling true tale of a man of war and searcher after peace during the birth and expansion of our nation.

Hard-back book measures roughly ~6-3/4" by ~9-1/2" (portrait); ~2-1/4" thick; 794 pages; no tears or folds; binding fully intact; very-very-light shelf-scuffing and wear. Book and dust-jacket are in otherwise fine to very-fine "UNUSED" condition.