Photo Credit: Seonaid Campbell
BETSY GAINES QUAMMEN
BETSY GAINES QUAMMEN is the author of American Zion and True West, which won the 2024 Reading the West Book Award. She examines the intersections of extremism, public lands, wildlife, and western communities, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Daily News, and History News Network. She received a PhD in history from Montana State University, a MS in environmental studies from University of Montana, and a BA in English from Colorado College. She lives in Bozeman, Montana, with her spouse, writer David Quammen.
BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
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THIS HAUNTED LAND
Reckoning with Ghosts and the Stories that Shape America
Why do humans need ghosts? And what do ghosts have to teach us?
This Haunted Land investigates some of America’s most enduring legends and uncovers how ghost stories can illuminate some of the most unsettling parts of history. With curiosity, a touch of skepticism, and an open-hearted willingness to learn from the living and the dead, Betsy Gaines Quammen takes readers on a journey into haunted towns, forgotten lives, and abandoned places. From a once-booming uranium mining community in Colorado to a fort on the coast of Florida that predates the United States itself, this riveting exploration of memory, mourning, folklore, and social anxiety shows that politicized efforts to rewrite history can only be defeated by bearing witness to the specters of the past.
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“This Haunted Land proves that our landscapes—from abandoned mines to stolen plains—hold the echoes of our greatest transgressions. No one can tell a ghost story, or a story about the soul of America, better than Gaines Quammen.”
—CMARIE FUHRMAN, Salmon Weather
OUT SEPTEMBER 2026!
TRUE WEST:
Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America
From the Northern Rockies to the Southwest deserts, Betsy Gaines Quammen explores how myths shape our identities, heighten polarizations, and fracture our shared understanding of the world around us. As she investigates the origins and effects of myths of the American West, Gaines Quammen travels through small towns and big cities, engaging people and building relationships at every stop.
“People think they ‘know’ the West but they’re usually wrong. That’s because there’s no region of our country more steeped in fallacy, fake news, and fable. Betsy Gaines Quammen, a wry and wise observer, takes us on a ride across the modern West—and along the way, disentangles reality from centuries of myth and mystique.”
—HAMPTON SIDES, New York Times bestselling author of Blood and Thunder
AMERICAN ZION:
Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West
American Zion is the story of the ongoing feud between Mormon ranching family the Bundys, the federal government, and the American public. Historian Betsy Gaines Quammen examines the roots of the Bundys’ cowboy confrontations, and how history has shaped an often-dangerous mindset which today feeds the militia movement and threatens public lands, wild species, and American heritage.
“Gaines Quammen uses science, broadminded inquiry, and historical records to capture all aspects of the movement to rescind the laws creating public lands. She also offers hope for the future of precious Southwestern landscapes.”
—BOOKLIST