Beyond the Blue Horizon

Paul Andrew Hutton's The Undiscovered Country, plus new books on Montana's racehorses, the notorious Kellys, Jose Cuervo, and a rare diary of the Utah War.

- Stuart Rosebrook

For more than four decades, award-winning historian Paul Andrew Hutton has been a major influence on the historiography of Western American history. As a champion of the genre, he has applied his passion in every theater of the subject matter to tell the story of the West.

From the classroom to documentary film, from journal editor to author, Hutton has been at the forefront of researching, writing and recounting the story of the American West for generations of students and scholars. His latest book, The Undiscovered Country: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Shaping of the American West (Dutton, $35), will undoubtedly be considered his finest work, a true capstone on his academic and professional journey from his undergraduate studies at the University of Indiana to his most recent post as interim curator of the Buffalo Bill Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming.

Hutton writes in his Preface, “The Undiscovered Country tells the epic story of American westward expansion from the era of the American Revolution to 1900.” The book’s title, a nod to Shakespeare, refers to the dark irony of how the conquest of the West built a new nation, but at the cost of the destruction of another people and the pristine land that had sustained them.

As an indirect student of Dr. Hutton’s since my graduate school work at Arizona State University, I have eagerly awaited