Blood in the Borderlands

The author is to be commended for his writing style, his wordsmithing, his command of sources, and his ability to balance the rather confused historiography on the building of Bent's Fort and its demise. His narrative is easy to follow, and his analysis is a compliment to his training. . . . Students of the fur and robe trades and those focusing on the Santa Fe Trail will find this book indispensable. -William R. Swagerty, Pacific Northwest Quarterly Well-researched and well-written, Blood in the Borderlands is a very readable account of the Bent family. The integration of kinship as an analytical framework makes this book more than the sum of its parts, and anyone with an interest in the nineteenth-century Southwest borderlands will find this work of interest. -William S. Kiser, Southwestern Historical Quarterly This book is a concise multigenerational saga of the Bent family in Colorado, New Mexico, and Indian Territory, particularly as their fortunes intertwined with the plight of the Southern Cheyennes, with whom the Bents intermarried and conducted business. . . . Beyreis combines the epic scope of earlier accounts like David Lavender's Bent's Fort (1954) with concepts of intercultural exchange in line with more recent scholarship, including Elliott West's The Contested Plains (1998) and James Brooks's Captives and Cousins (2002). -R. L. Dorman, Choice Blood in the Borderlands reads well and utilizes deep research to make a compelling argument in a book that tells a nuanced history of the southwestern borderlands through the lives and generations of the Bent family. -Hayden L. Nelson, Kansas History This is a remarkable book about what may well have been the most remarkable family of the American West. . . . Nimbly negotiating the color line, the Bents sometimes sided with the American state and sometimes challenged it to protect their Cheyenne kin. As told by David Beyreis, their story forces us to think hard about what it took for a family to survive in the West. -Pekka Hamalainen, author of The Comanche Empire Blood in the Borderlands brings all the major players of this fascinating borderlands family into a single frame in a brisk, well-told story that illuminates the transformation during the nineteenth century of the central plains and what became the U.S. Southwest. . . . Blood in the Borderlands is that rare volume that really should appeal to scholars and lay people alike. -Andrew R. Graybill, author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West