The Shoshoneans

Book excerpt: First published almost fifty years ago and long out of print, The Shoshoneans is a classic American travelogue about the Great Basin and Plateau region and the people who inhabit it, never before—or since—documented in such striking and memorable fashion. Neither a book of journalism nor a work of poetry, this powerful collaboration represents the wild wandering of a white poet and black photographer in Civil Rights era (also Vietnam War era) America through a part of the indigenous West that had resisted prior incursions. The expanded edition offers a wealth of supplemental material, much of it archival, which includes poetry, correspondence, the lecture “The Poet, the People, the Spirit,” and the essay “Ed Dorn in Santa Fe.”