The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890

A two-time National Book Award finalist's "ambitious and provocative" look at Custer's Last Stand, capitalism, and the rise of the cowboys-and-Indians legend (The New York Review of Books).

In The Fatal Environment, historian Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of Native Americans helped justify the course of America's rise to wealth and power. Using Custer's Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be...