Betsy Gaines Quammen, PhD
Historian & Writer
Author of This Haunted Land, American Zion, and True West, Betsy Gaines Quammen collects stories of haunted histories and wild landscapes to make sense of a place shaped by colonization, extraction, rebellion, myth, beauty, and land
Coming September 1, 2026
This Haunted Land
Coming September 2026
In This Haunted Land, Betsy Gaines Quammen investigates some of America's most enduring ghost stories and uncovers how they can help us come to terms with our unsettled past. With curiosity and an open-hearted willingness to learn from the living and the dead, Gaines Quammen takes readers on a riveting, sometimes spooky journey into the haunted towns, lands, waters, and parts of history that we too often ignore. From a once-booming uranium mine community now entombed in Colorado’s Mesa County, to America’s oldest fort on the east coast of Florida, to the forests of Arkansas where the ivory-billed woodpecker once took flight, This Haunted Land interweaves memory, mourning, folklore, and social anxiety—and shows that politicized efforts to rewrite history can be defeated by listening to the spectres of the past.
“The truth about ghost stories is that they are rarely about the dead. They aren’t the bumps in the night or the apparitions we fail to catch in mirrors; they are the sheets being pulled off of who we, the living, truly are. In This Haunted Land, Betsy Gaines Quammen 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 Quammen.”
—CMARIE FUHRMAN, Salmon Weather
Betsy Gaines Quammen voted Bozeman’s Favorite Local Author
+
True West voted Bozeman's Best Local Book
“In telling the stories that comprise True West, Betsy Gaines Quammen reminds us that in order to keep this fractured country together we must meet our fellow Americans where they are, on their own terms.”
—Beto O’Rourke, author of We’ve Got to Try
“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
True West explores myths of the West and how, if left unexamined, they distort the realities of the present and exacerbate polarizations. These misperceptions about land, politics, liberty, and self-determination threaten the wellbeing of western communities overrun by newcomers seeking a dream—and the country, unless America recognizes the dangers of building a national identity on illusion. Gaines Quammen interrogates it all by listening, carefully, to people from varying political and cultural perspectives as she seeks to reconcile the deep anger and broad misunderstandings that linger amid myths that define and impede the West and America.
American Zion
Cliven Bundy, God and Public Lands in the West
What People Are Saying
“Betsy Gaines Quammen has taken a deep, fascinating dive into a uniquely American brand of religious zealotry that poses a grave threat to our national parks, wilderness areas, wildlife sanctuaries, and other public lands. American Zion provides essential background for anyone concerned about the future of open space in the western United States. It also happens to be a delight to read.”
—Jon Krakauer, author of Under the Banner of Heaven
On Regulations of Public Lands
Betsy Gaines Quammen, was The Community Library’s Jack Grove Writer-In-Residence in November 2021 in Ketchum, ID, working at the historic Ernest and Mary Hemingway House and Preserve. She gave a lecture at The Ketchum Community Library during her stay.