Ghost Towns of the American West
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Ghost Towns of the American West
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Narrated by:
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Chuck Patyk
About this listen
The story of the American mining frontier can be traced in the ghost towns - from the camps of California's forty-niners to the 20th-century ruins in the Nevada desert. They mark an epoch of high adventure, of quick wealth and quicker poverty, of gambling and gun-slinging and hell-raising. We who have seen too many Western movies sometimes think that the legends of the Wild West were invented by scriptwriters - but the ghost towns remain, and their battered ruins testify that the legends are true, that behind the tall tales lies reality. Robert Silverberg has brought the ghost towns back to life in the rowdy splendor of their heyday - when eggs might cost three dollars apiece and a town's street be literally paved with silver, when a fortune could be made in a week and lost in an evening. History and travelers' tales are woven together with clarity and wit to create a lively account of a fascinating era in our history.
©1968 Robert Silverberg (P)2014 Redwood AudiobooksListeners also enjoyed...
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- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 78
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 67
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 67
The thrilling narrative history of one of the most enduring icons of the American West, the Pony Express, from the number-one New York Times bestselling co-author of American Sniper - an exciting tale of daring young men pushing limits to the extremes across the vast, rugged, and unsettled American West.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Picture of Wild West Life and the Pony
- By Pierre C. on 08-07-18
By: Jim DeFelice
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Ghosts of Gold Mountain
- The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad
- By: Gordon H. Chang
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 123
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 110
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 110
From across the sea, they came by the thousands, escaping war and poverty in southern China to seek their fortunes in America. Converging on the enormous western worksite of the Transcontinental Railroad, the migrants spent years dynamiting tunnels through the snow-packed cliffs of the Sierra Nevada and laying tracks across the burning Utah desert. Their sweat and blood fueled the ascent of an interlinked, industrial United States. But those of them who survived this perilous effort would be pushed to the margins of American life and then to the fringes of public memory.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Very inspiring, educational, and enlightening!
- By Amazon Customer on 06-25-19
By: Gordon H. Chang
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King and Queen of Malibu
- The True Story of the Battle for Paradise
- By: David K. Randall
- Narrated by: Eric Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 112
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 96
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 98
Over a half century, Malibu went from an untamed ranch in the middle of nowhere to a paradise seeded with movie stars. Behind its transformation is the love story of Frederick and May Rindge. He was a Harvard-trained confidant of presidents; she grew up on a hardscrabble Midwestern farm; yet their unlikely bond would shape history.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Detailed and interesting
- By SuperLuckyCat on 08-04-24
By: David K. Randall
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Nothing Like It in the World
- The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869
- By: Stephen E. Ambrose
- Narrated by: Jeffrey DeMunn
- Length: 15 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,104
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 788
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 788
Nothing Like It in the World is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise comes to life. The U.S. government pitted two companies - the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads - against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. As its peak the work force approached the size of Civil War armies, with as many as 15,000 workers on each line. The surveyors, the men who picked the route, lived off buffalo, deer, and antelope.
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1 out of 5 stars
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A tragic waste
- By Joshua Tretakoff on 04-11-03
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The Age of Gold
- The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream
- By: H.W. Brands
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 17 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 410
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 303
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 308
When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill on the American River, it completely transformed the territory of California. Hundreds of thousands of people sped to California by any means possible, and small cities sprung up to service their needs as they sought the precious metal. By 1850, California had become a state; it had also become a symbol of where the nation was going.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Very Enjoyable
- By Claire on 01-15-04
By: H.W. Brands
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Dreams of El Dorado
- A History of the American West
- By: H. W. Brands
- Narrated by: Matt Kugler
- Length: 17 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 407
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 349
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 350
In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West. He takes us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. He shows how the migrants' dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame - and how those same dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another. El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Dreadful narration
- By Fredmo on 12-09-19
By: H. W. Brands
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The Men Who United the States
- America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,177
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,073
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,067
How did America become “one nation, indivisible”? What unified a growing number of disparate states into the modern country we recognize today? To answer these questions, Winchester follows in the footsteps of America’s most essential explorers, thinkers, and innovators. Introducing the fascinating people who played a pivotal role in creating today’s United States, he ponders whether the historic work of uniting the States has succeeded, and to what degree.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Sarcastic
- By Cynthia Hartman on 06-16-16
By: Simon Winchester
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The Rush
- America's Fevered Quest for Fortune, 1848-1853
- By: Edward Dolnick
- Narrated by: Bernard Setaro Clark
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 74
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 65
In the spring of 1848, rumors began to spread that gold had been discovered in a remote spot in the Sacramento Valley. A year later, newspaper headlines declared "Gold Fever!" as hundreds of thousands of men and women borrowed money, quit their jobs, and allowed themselves - for the first time ever - to imagine a future of ease and splendor.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Loved it. Want to hear more of Clarks work.
- By Carlos on 01-11-16
By: Edward Dolnick
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City of the Century
- The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America
- By: Donald L. Miller
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 24 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 107
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 94
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 95
Here, witness Chicago's growth from a desolate fur-trading post in the 1830s to one of the world's most explosively alive cities by 1900. Donald Miller's powerful narrative embraces it all: Chicago's wild beginnings, its reckless growth, its natural calamities (especially the Great Fire of 1871), its raucous politics, its empire-building businessmen, its world-transforming architecture, its rich mix of cultures, its community of young writers and journalists, and its staggering engineering projects.
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2 out of 5 stars
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A STORY THAT TRIES TOO HARD....AND FAILS
- By The Louligan on 02-01-15
By: Donald L. Miller
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Cattle Kingdom
- The Hidden History of the Cowboy West
- By: Christopher Knowlton
- Narrated by: John McLain
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 126
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 112
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 111
The Open Range cattle era lasted barely a quarter-century, but it left America irrevocably changed. These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades. Cattle Kingdom reveals the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Disappointing - Author has an Agenda
- By McMullen on 09-19-21
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The Johnstown Flood
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 4,148
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,308
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 3,289
At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A page-turner! HIstory that reads like a novel
- By Susan K Donley on 06-17-05
By: David McCullough
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Butch Cassidy
- The True Story of an American Outlaw
- By: Charles Leerhsen
- Narrated by: Pete Simonelli
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 72
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 62
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Story4 out of 5 stars 62
For more than a century the life and death of Butch Cassidy have been the subject of legend, spawning a small industry of mythmakers and a major Hollywood film. But who was Butch Cassidy, really? Charles Leerhsen, best-selling author of Ty Cobb, sorts out the facts from folklore and paints a “compelling portrait of the charming, debonair, ranch hand-turned-outlaw” (Ron Hansen, author of The Kid) of the American West.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Butch Cassidy is still a modern day hero!
- By Anonymous User on 12-12-20
By: Charles Leerhsen
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Roughing It
- By: Mark Twain
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 15 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,214
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,085
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,077
In 1861, young Mark Twain found himself adrift as a tenderfoot in the Wild West. Roughing It is a hilarious record of his travels over a six-year period that comes to life with his inimitable mixture of reporting, social satire, and rollicking tall tales. Twain reflects on his scuffling years mining silver in Nevada, working at a Virginia City newspaper, being downandout in San Francisco, reporting for a newspaper from Hawaii, and more.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The wild humorist of the West
- By Tad Davis on 01-02-12
By: Mark Twain
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Gold Diggers
- Striking It Rich in the Klondike
- By: Charlotte Gray
- Narrated by: Steven Cooper
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 53
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 48
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
Between 1896 and 1899, thousands of people lured by gold braved a grueling journey into the remote wilderness of North America. Within two years, Dawson City, in the Canadian Yukon, grew from a mining camp of four hundred to a raucous town of more than thirty thousand. The stampede to the Klondike was the last great gold rush in history. Scurvy, dysentery, frostbite, and starvation stalked all who dared to be in Dawson. And yet the possibilities attracted people from all walks of life.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Disappointed...
- By Michael McGrath on 01-29-14
By: Charlotte Gray
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A Crack in the Edge of the World
- America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 587
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 330
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 326
San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and destructive force. In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, San Francisco and a string of towns to its north-northwest and the south-southeast were overcome by an enormous shaking that was compounded by the violent shocks of an earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter scale.
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2 out of 5 stars
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7 Hours and 45 minutes . . .
- By Tim on 12-09-05
By: Simon Winchester
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The Big Burn
- Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America
- By: Timothy Egan
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 168
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 149
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 149
In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan put the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl at the center of a rich history, told through characters he brought to indelible life. Now he performs the same alchemy with the Big Burn, the largest-ever forest fire in America and the tragedy that cemented Teddy Roosevelt's legacy in the land.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Mediocre
- By Mona on 11-04-20
By: Timothy Egan