Riders of the Purple Sage

A Mormon woman in southern Utah refuses to marry the man her elders have chosen, and a gunman in black leather rides into the valley on her side. Grey wrote it in 1912 and effectively created the Western as America pictures it; his publisher's readers wanted the attacks on the church cut, and he refused. Forty-eight plates, from Thomas Moran and John Mix Stanley among others, carry the wide western land and its weather, the range and the hunt that Grey's riders cross.