Las Vegas, Nevada - Success Depends on the Animals: Emigrants, Livestock, and Wild Animals on the Overland Trails, 1840-1869 by Diana L. Ahmad

"Diana Ahmad has written the definitive history, told largely from the point of view of the animals, of the great pre-1869 overland wagon migrations." - John H. Monnett, author of Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed: The Struggle for the Powder River Country in 1866 and the Making of the Fetterman Myth

Between 1840 and 1869, thousands of people crossed the American continent looking for a new life in the West. Success Depends on the Animals explores the relationships and encounters that these emigrants had with animals, both wild and domestic, as they traveled the Overland Trail. In the longest migration of people in history, the overlanders were accompanied by thousands of work animals such as horses, oxen, mules, and cattle. These travelers also brought dogs and other companion animals, and along the way confronted unknown wild animals. Author Diana L. Ahmad's study is the first to explore how these emigrants became dependent upon the animals that traveled with them, and how, for some, this dependence influenced a new way of thinking about the human-animal bond. Drawing on primary sources such as journals, diaries, and newspaper accounts, Ahmad explores how these new experiences shaped fresh ideas about the role of animals in pioneer life.

Diana L. Ahmad received her PhD at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is a University of Missouri Curators' Teaching Professor of History at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, where she specializes in the history of the American West, the Pacific, and Modern East Asia. She is the author of The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Nineteenth-Century American West.

$31.95 / cloth / 144 pages / print ISBN: 978-0-87417-997-2 / ebook ISBN: 978-1-943859-10-8