American Nomads: Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, Truckers, and Bullriders

by Richard Grant

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Richard Grant has never spent more than 22 consecutive nights under the same roof. Motivated partly by his own wanderlust and partly by his realisation that America is a land populated by wanderers, he set out to test his theory and this book is the result.

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This book was so fascinating, I must have about half the bibliography on the small room floor, waiting to be read. (

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dmarsh451 | Apr 1, 2013 |

Some people are "Born Under a Wondering Star" or with itchy feet that have to me on the move. More power to them, they will see more of the world than I ever will. (

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cwflatt | Mar 10, 2012 |

http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2007/06/24-ghost-riders-travels-with-american.html (

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tamaranth | Jun 26, 2007 |

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Thomas Cook Travel Book Award (Winner – 2004)

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Ghost riders : travels with American nomads (UK)

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Ghost Riders (BBC documentary 2011)

Epigraph

I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large and without mercy... Some men ride on such space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive.
Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael

But there are things which you have said to me which I do not like. They were not sweet like sugar, but bitter like gourds. You have said that you want to put us on a reservation, to build us houses and make us medicine lodges [hospitals]. I do not want them. I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures and everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls.
Ten Bears (Comanche) at Medicine Lodge, Kansas, 1867

... to really tell about this whole extraordinary culture―in Texas and the Southwest, all the way to California―of aimless wandering, this mobile, uprooted life: the seven-mile-long trailer parks, the motorcycles, the campers, the people who have no addresses or even last names.
Truman Capote, Capote: A Biography

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[prologue]
Looking back at my own American wanderings, they seem to flow together as one; memories strung out on a single cord of highway, fourteen years long and headed nowhere in particular.

Notes from an all-night truck stop on the outskirts of Albuquerque.

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Originally published in the UK with title: Ghost riders : travels with American nomads

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Richard Grant has never spent more than 22 consecutive nights under the same roof. Motivated partly by his own wanderlust and partly by his realisation that America is a land populated by wanderers, he set out to test his theory and this book is the result.

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