best overall
Story By Mike Overall, Photo By Susan O'Connor

The history of the American West is rife with men and women around whom, for centuries, myths, legends and boundless paradoxes have swirled. One of the quintessential figures of this nation’s westward expansion was Granville Stuart, who was born in 1834 and died in 1918, the same year the unprecedented slaughter that was known as the Great War ended in a shattered and blood-soaked Europe.

Although Stuart’s name may not be that well known to lay readers and amateur historians who remain fascinated by the West, two Arkansas State University historians and scholars, the husband-and-wife team of Doctors Clyde A. Milner II and Carol A. O’Connor, have published a groundbreaking biography, As Big as the West: The Pioneer Life of Granville Stuart, that is garnering impressive reviews both within and throughout the academic community.

Published by the Oxford University Press, As Big as the West is a hefty tome (weighing in at 448 pages) which one reviewer said combines the writers’ impeccable scholarship and keen sense of historical perspective with their unique ability to tell a fascinating story via a narrative that is beautifully written and constructed.

“It is interesting and refreshing to read a work of history that is presented to the reader as a web of interrelationships instead of your standard chronology,” said Dr. Gregory Hansen, the esteemed ASU folklorist, scholar and writer who, in mid-December, introduced the biographers when the two gave a public presentation of their latest work at a reading and book-signing gathering held at the Dean B. Ellis Library on the Jonesboro campus. “This book is really, really well-written and engages the reader from beginning to end. As Big as the West will stand for many years to come as a model of how history should be written.”

Twelve years in the making, the book was a labor of love for Milner and O’Connor, whose odyssey of literary discovery has culminated in a biography of a most unusual and fascinating man, one whose Western exploits and adventures rival those of the legendary Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull. As one reviewer wrote when the book was published, “Granville Stuart is a quintessential Western figure...who embodied many of the contradictions of America’s westward expansion. Stuart collected guns, herded cattle, mined for gold, and killed men he thought were outlaws. But he also taught himself Shoshone, French and Spanish, denounced formal religion, married a Shoshone woman, and eventually became a United States diplomat.”

Stuart was also an avid collector of books whose personal library included thousands of volumes.

Milner and O’Connor, co-editors of the acclaimed Oxford History of the American West, trace their subject’s remarkable trajectory from his birth in Virginia, through his formative years in the agricultural settlements of Iowa and the mining camps of Gold Rush California, to his rough-and-tumble life in Montana and his rise to prominence as a public figure, the reviewer said. “Along the way, we see Granville and his brother James battling bandits and horse thieves and becoming leaders of the new Montana territory.”

The writers explore Stuart’s life as a cattleman, including his role as the leader of a vigilante force, known as “Stuart’s Stranglers,” responsible for several hangings in 1884, his abandonment of his half-Shoshone children after his second marriage, his government services in offices ranging from head of the Butte, Montana, Public Library to U.S. Minister to Paraguay and Uruguay, and his final years, a time in which he composed a memoir, Forty Years on the Frontier, which is still widely read for his drama-infused account of the era.

“As Big as the West fully illuminates the conflicting realities of the frontier, where a man could speak of wiping out “half-breeds” while fathering eleven mixed-race children, and go from vigilante to diplomat in the space of a few years,” another reviewer wrote.

The writers’ book has received glowing reviews, including a starred piece from Publishers Weekly. The book has also received accolades from the Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and from several well-known writers, among them Ivan Doig, Hampton Sides and William Kittredge.

During the presentation at the ASU library, Milner said that early on in the Stuart project, he asked his wife to join him as co-author, “because writing is such a lonely thing.” He also said he wanted the writing to mesh in such a way the reader would not be consciously aware that alternate chapters were written by two authors.

Dr. Hansen drew laughter from the audience when he said he could not tell which of the two writers wrote what specific chapter in the book. “It’s hard to sort out the authorial voice, which means that the writing of As Big as the West was truly a team effort.”

O’Connor is associate dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. She received her doctorate in history.

For 18 years, Milner edited the Western Historical Quarterly, a scholarly journal with a mission to promote the study of the North American West. The journal is based at Utah State University, where both writers taught for 25 years before coming to ASU. He received his doctorate in American studies. Both are graduates of Yale University.

The writers have been designated distinguished lecturers by the Organization of American Historians and are two of the four scholars so recognized in Arkansas.
Married for 31 years, the historians have two adult children.

ASU ALUM CO-AUTHORS BOOK

In other book news of interest to readers in Jonesboro and the area, writer Mark Grisham, an ASU alumnus who played football for the school in the early 1980s, has co-authored, along with his longtime friend and writing partner David Donaldson, Bedlam South, a Civil War-era novel set in a hospital for war criminals and the insane. Grisham, a Mississippi native who earned a degree in history, visited ASU earlier last month for a book-signing session at the Cooper Alumni Center.