Showing results by author "Stewart Desmond" in All Categories

In Out of the Ashes, the second volume of the series Main Street: The History of Buffalo, Buffalo grows from a frontier outpost to the Great Lakes port of the Erie Canal. The book focuses on two stories: the resistance of the Seneca Nation to displacement by white settlers and the construction of the Erie Canal. The great orator Red Jacket led the fight of the Native Americans against the Ogden Company's attempt to remove the Seneca from the Buffalo Creek Reservation (now South Buffalo). The book uncovers the witty and incisive speeches of Red Jacket in council with the rapacious land ...

Out of the Wilderness, the opening volume of the series, tells the story of the encounter of Europeans, African Americans and Native Americans on the Niagara Frontier. In colonial days, the site of Buffalo was the gateway to the American West inside the territory of the Seneca Nation. The book follows the diplomacy and warfare between French imperialists and Seneca leaders over control of the famous portage route around Niagara Falls. The epic story of Daniel Chabert, Buffalo's first European farmer, illuminates the conflicts of the era. With the coming of the British to the Niagara ...

Main Street is “a triumph.” Erik Brady, Buffalo News. On a Roller Coaster: 1902-1939 is the fifth book in the series Main Street: The History of Buffalo. The era is a roller-coaster ride of economic boom and bust—and mayors of titanic achievement. At the start of the book, as the Pan-American Exposition in North Buffalo is torn down, a city of steel rises along Lake Erie just south of town—the massive new steel plant. In the business center of town, churches of Joseph’s Ellicott’s Buffalo are selling off their lots and moving north from Downtown to be closer to with parishioners...

Into the Temple of Music culminates in the tragic confrontation of President William McKinley and assassin Leon Czolgosz in the Temple of Music of the Pan American Exposition. The rapid growth of industry and trade in Buffalo created fortunes larger than ever known before. The wealthy built many fine homes described in this book. They sponsored great public buildings like the Buffalo Library on Lafayette Square. Perhaps most important of all, the wealthy invited Frederick Law Olmsted to town to create a parks system. But the wealth came about through exploitation of cheap immigrant labor on...

Into the Whirlwind, the third volume of the series Main Street: The History of Buffalo, tells the story of the years leading up to the American Civil War through the point of view of the growing city of Buffalo. Only a mile from Canada across the Niagara River, Buffalo became a destination for fugitive enslaved people trying for freedom. The book tells the story of the small African-American community in Buffalo that helped on the road to Canada. Early White abolitionist George Washington Jonson left a vast diary describing his efforts on behalf of African Americans--efforts often unpopular...