Ernest Staples Osgood

Ernest Staples Osgood (October 29, 1888 – June 22, 1983) was an American historian of the American West and Guggenheim Fellow best known for his book The Day of the Cattleman and for his work on the field notes of Captain William Clark.

Osgood was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on October 29, 1888, the son of John C. and Eveline H. Osgood and the nephew of prominent colonial American historian Herbert Levi Osgood. There, he attended Lynn Classical High School. He went on to attend Dartmouth College, graduating with his A.B. in 1912. After brief, unsuccessful stints in Ohio and Chicago, Osgood moved to Montana. From 1914 to 1924, he taught history at Helena High School in Helena, Montana, where his interest in and love of the American West and particularly Montana was stoked.

In 1924, he moved to Madison, Wisconsin to pursue a PhD in History at the University of Wisconsin, which he was awarded in 1927. After teaching at the University of Wisconsin from 1927 to 1929, he moved westward to the other side of the St. Croix River (Wisconsin-Minnesota) to a professorship at the University of Minnesota.

His scholarly work focused largely on issues relating to the American West. His book The Day of the Cattleman, a regional study of cattlemen in Montana and Wyoming in the mid-nineteenth century, was his most critically acclaimed work. It focuses on the cattlemen's utilization of the semi-arid Great Plains region as well as their roles in railroad building and building an economic foundation for the American West. His work on The Day of the Cattleman along with a number of subsequent articles in the journals Minnesota History and Agricultural History were enough to earn him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936. This fellowship was to support a book on Montana history which never materialized. Along with his own scholarship, Dr. Osgood was an active participant in the historical conversation by writing numerous book reviews of works on the American West well into his retirement in the 1960s, most notably reviewing Walter Prescott Webb's seminal work The Great Plains in 1932.

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