Ghost Towns of the American West

by Raymond Bial

Overview

If it is abandoned by all or most of its inhabitants, a settlement becomes a ghost town. The buildings and dirt streets may remain, but the character and soul of the place change entirely. And so it was with mining camps, lumber camps, and cowboy towns scattered across America, particularly in the West: places with names like Gregory's Diggings, Deadwood, Bodie, Calico, Goldfield, and Tombstone, some of the over 30,000 deserted towns in the United States.

Why did people come to these isolated places? Why did they leave? As Raymond Bial's narrative explores the history of our ghost towns, his well-composed photo-graphs silently tell their stories: of bustling, muddy streets, of large mercantile stores, and, ultimately, of short-lived dreams of gold, fertile land, or simply a good place to call home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547561899
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/26/2001
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	48
Lexile:	1100L (what's this?)
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Raymond Bial is an acclaimed photoessayist for children. Four of his books were chosen as Notable Books in the Field of Social Studies by the NCSS. He lives in Urbana, Illinois, with his wife and children.

Editorial Reviews

Bial's latest photo-essay delves into the mystery of abandoned Western towns and offers insight into the region's boom-and-bust legacy but ultimately disappoints. The volume begins by posing the questions "What sad and joyous events happened within the tumbledown walls and wind-blown streets?" and "Why did people settle in these lonesome places?" Unfortunately, the real draw of the ghost towns was the larger-than-life characters who came through them, and the sense of immediacy and the human cast that made Bial's The Underground Railroad so successful goes missing here. The author's solid research incorporates some primary source quotes and touches on some of the Wild West's best-known incidents (the shoot-out at the OK Corral; Wild Bill Hickock getting shot in the back during a poker game), but never fully captures the flavor of these colorful legends. (Fans of these dark heroes would do better with Andrew Glass's recent Bad Guys.) The best of Bial's photographs zoom in on telling details: a metal sculpture of a prospector, aged to a gray that blends with a cloudy sky; a saloon's windowsill filled with liquor bottles, overtaken by cobwebs and dust, filtering sunlight through plum and moss glass. But a few photos feature the same subjects, and several captions repeat nearly identical wording. Still, for aficionados of the Gold Rush or westward expansion, the photos here are worth a look. Ages 8-12. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Gr 4-8-At the heart of Bial's new book are the photographs, most of which are his: sharply focused, brightly colored daytime shots of remaining or restored buildings and the tools and necessities of their former inhabitants, or moody twilit skies against which the silhouettes of old buildings rear up. There is also a scattering of vintage photographs that stand out distinctly from Bial's more vivid approach. The text, in which the author moves from a general discussion of how locales come to be abandoned to a more specific look at the ghost towns of the 19th-century American West and the people who created and vacated them, can be described as an extended essay. Period quotations, especially several from Mark Twain, provide pointed insights into the viewpoints of the people who lived in these communities. Bial also surveys some of the most famous residents of various towns, including the Earp brothers and their involvement in the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. The lack of an index or a division of the text into thematic or chronological chapters will limit the book's use for reports or research, as might the occasionally romanticized comments. However, this is a topic that has not been recently treated for younger readers, and fans of photography and the Old West will be charmed by the author's details and the clarity of his shots. An extensive bibliography will also guide readers who want to know more to the appropriate books.-Coop Renner, Moreno Elementary School, El Paso, TX Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Bial (A Handful of Dirt, p. 299, etc.) conjures up ghostly images of the Wild West with atmospheric photos of weathered clapboard and a tally of evocative names: Tombstone, Deadwood, Goldfield, Progress, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, the OK Corral. Tracing the life cycle of the estimated 30,000 ghost towns (nearly 1300 in Utah alone), he captures some echo of their bustling, rough-and-tumble past with passages from contemporary observers like Mark Twain:"If a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was appear in public in a white shirt or stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated." Among shots of run-down mining works, dusty, deserted streets, and dark eaves silhouetted against evening skies, Bial intersperses 19th-century photos and prints for contrast, plus an occasional portrait of a grizzled modern resident. He suggests another sort of resident too:"At night that plaintive hoo-hoo may be an owl nesting in a nearby saguaro cactus—or the moaning of a restless ghost up in the graveyard." Children seeking a sense of this partly mythic time and place in American history, or just a delicious shiver, will linger over his tribute. (bibliography) (Nonfiction. 9-11)

Kirkus Reviews