American Exploration and Travel Series – serie

Written as a scrupulously accurate guidebook to the prairies and as an authoritative account of the early Santa Fe trade, Commerce of the Prairies has been a favorite of historians, ethnologists, naturalists, and collectors of Western Americana for generations. But Gregg's masterpiece is not for specialists alone: its vivid descriptions of desert mirages, wagon caravans, Indian alarms and attacks, buffalo hunts, and other early Western phenomena will delight all who wish to know the country as it was before the great herds of buffalo were slaughtered and the roving Indians confined to reservations, before the landscape was transformed by barbed wire, domestic cattle, plowed fields, and modern highways.Josiah Gregg, a man of rare sensitivity and passionate science interest, joined a caravan of traders bound for Santa Fé in 1831 and almost immediately developed a fascination for the adventure-packed life of Santa Fé trader. And during the ten years that he engaged in the San Fé trade, Gregg took copious notes on the life and landscape of the American prairies and the Mexican plateau, later utilizing them in Commerce of the Prairies.This new edition faithfully follows the rare first edition, to and including the maps and illustrations. It will be welcomed both by readers familiar with the importance and interest of Gregg's work and by readers who have yet to discover its attraction.

In this classic of western Americana, George Frederick Ruxton, who died in St. Louis in 1848 at the youthful age of twenty-seven, brilliantly brings to life the whole heroic age of the Mountain Men. The author, from his intimate acquaintance with the trappers and traders of the American Far West, vividly recounts the story of two of the most adventurous of these hardy pioneers - Killbuck and La Bonté, whose daring, bravery, and hair-breadth escapes from their numerous Indian and ""Spaniard"" enemies were legend among their fellow-frontiersmen.With Ruxton, we follow Killbuck and La Bonté and their mountain companions - Old Bill Williams, ""Black"" Harris, William Sublette, Joseph Walker, and others - across the prairies and forests, west from picturesque old Bent's Fort, into the dangerous Arapaho country near the headwaters of the Platte. We share with them the culinary delights of their campfires - buffalo ""boudins"" and beaver tails - and hear from their own lips, in the incomparable mountaineer dialect, hair-raising stories of frontier life and humorous tales of trading camp and frontier post.Life in the Far West, then, is adventure extraordinary - the true chronicle of the rugged Mountain Men whose unflinching courage and total disregard for personal safety or comfort opened the Far West to the flood of settlers who were to follow. The breath-taking water colors and sketches, which depict with great detail many of the familiar scenes of the early West, were done by one of Ruxton's contemporaries and fellow-explorers, Alfred Jacob Miller.

More than a travel book, more than an autobiography, Ruxon of the Rockies is a rare and vivid account of a man who lived during a heroic age: George Frederick Ruxton lived among and wrote about the traders and trappers of the American West.Ruxton crammed a dozen lifetimes of adventure into his brief twenty-seven years. Leaving his native England in 1838, at the age of seventeen, he set out on endless journeys - fighting in the Carlist Wars in Spain, stationed with the British army in Ireland, hunting with Indians in Upper Canada, attempting to penetrate to the interior of Africa, and carrying out a mission for his government in Mexico and the American West.In all his travels, nothing won his heart so completely as the Rocky Mountains. With the awareness of a poet and down-to-earth nature of an explorer, Ruxton wrote of their awesome grandeur, bountiful wildlife, hardy mountain men, and their inexorable annihilation of the weakling. While on his way for a second, more extended visit to his beloved Rockies, Ruxton died in St. Louis.A rewarding literary experience, this volume is essentially Ruxton's autobiography. Sections on Africa and the one on Mexico and the Rocky Mountains appeared during Ruxton's lifetime, but earlier portions have never been published before.  Ruxton of the Rockies is illustrated with sketches from his notebooks and reproductions of the incomparable watercolors of Alfred Jacob Miller, a great Western artist of Ruxton's time.

After the Civil War, four geological and geographical surveys, later called the Great Surveys, Undertook the massive task of finding out what lay west of the hundredth meridian in the vast American wilderness. Parties led by Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden, medical doctor turned geologist, Clarence King, aristocrat and intellectual, John Wesley Powell, conqueror of the Colorado River, and Lieutenant George M. Wheeler, determined military man and scientist, roamed over the wild country during the years 1867-79, observing, analyzing, mapping, and at the end of each season, returning to Washington to publish their results.For the first time in book form, Richard A. Bartlett has recreated for the reader the hardships, both physical and financial, the discoveries, and the high adventures of the bold, headstrong, and often brilliant men of the Great Surveys as they climbed the Rockies, explored the Yellowstone, or battled the Colorado.

In 1806 President Thomas Jefferson sent cartographer Thomas Freeman and botanist Peter Custis to explore the southen Louisiana Purchase westward to the Rocky Moutnains. Stopped by a Spanish army in what is today extreme southern Oklahoma, they did not complete their mission. President Jefferson minimized their failure by focusing instead on the success of their northern counterparts Lewis and Clark. Hence the fame of Lewis and Clark and the virtual anonymity of Freeman and Custis-until now, thanks to editor Dan L. Flores.Dan Flores presents the primary documents created by Freeman and Custis during their ill-fated attempt to explore the Louisiana territory and areas west of the Mississippi in 1806.

The intimate, human memories regarding Charles M. Russell, his genius and eccentricities, which Frank Linderman set down shortly after the death of his good friend, constitute a miscellany of personal insights for which any of Russell's biographers ought to have given his eyeteeth. But in none of the increasingly frequent Russell commentaries, apparently, has use ever been made of these prime source materials.When Russell and Linderman met, it was to be expected a close friendship would result. Their interests, experiences, and natural inclinations were of the same cloth. They loved untrammeled people in virgin country; they had high regard for the old-time Indian and his mores; they held the encroachments upon the old West of civilization's less laudable aspects in mutual disdain; and, finally, Linderman with words and Russell with paint and clay were professional artists concerned in the re-creation of a beloved time fast slipping away.These recollections of their shared campfires, trails, conversations, and fun constitute the finest portrait extant of Charley Russell, the human being, pulsing with personality, quip, and many of his well-known tall tales.

In the vast body of material dealing with Custer's ""last stand,"" the journal kept by young Lieutenant James H. Bradley of the Seventh Infantry is at once graphic, incisive, and of first-rate historical importance. It is also little known.It records in detail the major incidents of the march of the Montana Column, under command of Colonel John Gibbon, to participate in the Sioux campaign of 1876. Beginning on March 17, when five companies of the regiment left Fort Shaw, it traces the progress of the column and ends abruptly with the entry for June 26, when Gibbon's command camped on the site of present Crow Agency, Montana, amid abundant indications that Custer's Seventh Cavalry had met with disaster. A letter written by Bradley describing the finding of the bodies on the Custer battlefield on the Little Big Horn is appended to provide a fitting conclusion.Bradley's journal, however, is much more than an account of a military command moving through unsettled country against a primitive foe. The Lieutenant was a gifted writer with definite scientific and historical interests, a man of infinite curiosity, who not only recorded the daily progress but also added ""historical notices of the country traversed."" His description of the grief of the Crow scouts on hearing the first news of the disaster of the Little Big Horn is a classic in the literature of the American West. A rare treat for all readers interested in the Indian wars, the journal was first published in a limited edition in 1896.

As the Quincentennial Celebration of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America approaches, interest in the voyage, and in the questions surrounding it, continues to grow. This definitive edition of Columbus's account of the voyage presents the most accurate printed version of his journal available to date. Unfortunately both Columbus's original manuscript, presented to Ferdinand and Isabella along with other evidence of his discoveries, and a single complete copy have been lost for centuries. The primary surviving record of the voyage-part quotation, part summary of the complete copy-is a transcription made by Bartolomé de las Casas in the 1530s.This new edition of the Las Casas manuscript presents its entire contents-including notes, insertions, and canceled text-more accurately, completely, and graphically than any other Spanish text published so far. In addition, the new translation, which strives for readability and accuracy, appears on pages facing the Spanish, encouraging on-the- spot comparisons of the translation with the original. Study of the work is further facilitated by extensive notes, documenting differences between the editors' transcription and translation and those of other transcribers and translators and summarizing current research and debates on unanswered current research and debates on unanswered questions concerning the voyage. In addition to being the only edition in which Spanish and English are presented side by side, this edition includes the only concordance ever prepared for the Diario.Awaited by scholars, this new edition will help reduce the guesswork that has long plagued the study of Columbus's voyage. It may shed light on a number of issues related to Columbus's navigational methods and the identity of his landing places, issues whose resolution depend, at least in part, on an accurate transcription of the Diario. Containing day-by-day accounts of the voyage and the first sighting of land, of the first encounters with the native populations and the first appraisals of his islands explored, and of a suspenseful return voyage to Spain, the Diario provides a fascinating and useful account to historians, geographers, anthropologists, sailors, students, and anyone else interested in the discovery-or in a very good sea story.

In 1839 a journalist for the New Orleans Picayune, Matthew C. Field, joined a company of merchants and tourists headed west on the Santa Fe Trail. Leaving Independence, Missouri, early in July ""with a few wagons and a carefree spirit,"" Field recorded his vivid impressions of travel westward on the Santa Fe Trail and, on the return trip, eastward along the Cimarron Route. Written in verse in his journal and in eighty-five articles later published in the Picayune, Field's observations offer the modern reader a unique glimpse of life in the settlements of Mexico and on the Santa Fe Trail.

In 1841 U.S. government authorities sent Major Ethan Allen Hitchcock to Indian Territory to investigate numerous charges of fraud and profiteering by various contractors dealing with the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Indians, who had been removed from the South during the last decade. Hitchcock's report, filed after four months of travel, exposed such a high level of graft and corruption that his investigation was suppressed and never brought to the attention of Congress.Hitchcock kept nine personal diaries of his travels and observations, however, and they reveal much historic and ethnographic information on Indian life in Indian Territory. He observes how the Indians were adjusting alter removal and includes many details on their customs, beliefs, culture, religion, ceremonies, amusements, industry, tribal councils, and government. To aid the modern reader, editor Grant Foreman provides an introduction and annotations, and Michael D. Green, in his foreword, explains the politics behind Hitchcock's mission to Indian Territory and his accomplishments in advancing ethnographic knowledge.

When General Stephen Watts Kearny's Army of the West marched into Santa Fe, New Mexico, on August 18, 1846, Richard Smith Elliott, a young Missouri volunteer, was included in its ranks. In addition to Lieutenant Elliott's duties in the Laclede Rangers, he served as a regular correspondent to the St. Louis Reveille. An entertaining and educated observer, Elliott provided readers back home with an account of the grueling march over the famous Santa Fe Trail, the triumphant entry of the army into Santa Fe, the U.S. occupation of New Mexico, and the volunteers' eventual return to St. Louis.Noted southwestern scholars Mark L. Gardner and Marc Simmons present here, for the first time, all of Elliott's letters published in the Reveille under his nom-de-plume, John Brown, using passages from his autobiography for the same period to fill in a break resulting from a few missing letters. Also included are Elliott's literary sketches, drawn from his Mexican War experiences and the people he met and served with.

Long before their first contact with whites, the Mandan and Hidatsa villagers along the Missouri River in what is now central North Dakota had established a prosperous center for a vast intertribal trade network across the Northern Plains. Early white fur traders, learning of the existence of these villages, were quickly drawn to them.French, British, and Canadian traders were the first to arrive. Representatives of the Montreal-based North West Company were soon followed to the Missouri by employees of the rival Hudson's Bay Company, and for nearly thirty years the two groups competed for the beaver pelts collected by the Mandans and Hidatsas from tribes farther west.Contact with the Canadian traders, and later with others who ascended the Missouri from Saint Louis, had a profound effect on the tribes, for it introduced Euro-American culture and trade goods that led to the extinction of their way of life.There is especially good documentation of the dealings between the Mandans and Hidatsas and the whites for the period 1790 to 1806, when several literate traders visited the Indian villages and recorded their experiences and impressions in lively, colorful narratives. In this book are presented new, dependable, annotated transcriptions of five of the most important of these documents, the narratives of the traders John Macdonell, David Thompson, François-Antoine Larocque (two journals), and Charles McKenzie. Through the narratives and the editors' own thorough historical introduction, W. Raymond Wood and Thomas D. Thiessen reexamine the history of the fur trade in the North and provide fresh insight into that shadowy period. New maps show in detail the routes of the trader-narrators, and the appendix provides useful statistics, inventories, and financial accounts of the fur trade of the era.Early Fur Trade on the Northern Plains will be of use not only to scholars of the fur trade and anthropologists but also to all those interested in the exploration and early history of the vast Northern Plains.

Alexander Ross offers a completely authentic account of the earliest attempts by men of European background to come to grips with the climate, geography, and inhabitants of the Northwest at a time when resourcefulness and daring were prime virtues.It offers, moreover, an on-the-scene interpretation of the conflict between American and British interests, their rivalry for the vast wealth in Northwest furs, the conflict between free trade and corporate enterprise in the wilderness, and the conflict with the North West Company itself.

To follow the journeys made by Mackay and Evans up the Missouri and across the plains in 1795-97 is to begin to appreciate the kind of world Lewis and Clark found when they voyaged up the river in 1804. . . . Of all those waterways, none has captured the American imagination more than the Missouri. . . . It is a river of promise, of dreams, and of dreams denied."" -James P. Ronda, from the ForewordWhen Mackay and Evans returned to Spanish St. Louis in 1797, they were hailed as ""the two most illustrious travelers in the northern parts of this continent."" Ironically, though the findings of Mackay and Evans were responsible for much of the early success of Lewis and Clark in their expedition, the adulation that followed Lewis and Clark's successful return completely eclipsed Mackay and Evans's reputations. In Prologue to Lewis and Clark, W. Raymond Wood narrates the history of this long-forgotten but important expedition up the Missouri River.The Mackay and Evans expedition was more than an exploratory mission. It was the last effort by Spain to gain control over the Missouri River basin in the decade before the United States purchased the Louisiana territory. In that respect, it failed. But the expedition was successful as a journey of exploration. The maps and documents they created later provided the Lewis and Clark expedition with invaluable information for its first full year.Consolidating a collection of eighteen contemporary documents relating to the Mackay and Evans expedition as well as his own research and analysis, Wood provides an in-depth examination of the expedition's background, execution, and final results.Volume 79 in the American Exploration and Travel Series

In 1761 Ilarione da Bergamo, a Capuchin friar, journeyed to Mexico to gather alms for foreign missions. After harrowing voyages across the Mediterranean and Atlantic, he reached Mexico City in 1763. His account reveals the squalor, crime, and other perils in the viceregal capital, and details daily life: food, public hygiene, sexual morality, medical practices, and popular diversions. His observations about religious life are particularly valuable. Ilarione also describes mining and refining techniques, recounts a bitter and bloody miners' strike, and recalls traveling across bandit-infested wilderness to Guadalajara.After his return to Italy, Ilarione wrote an account of his journey, published here for the first time in English. The editors have liberally annotated the text, written an introduction about Ilarione's life and the historical context of his journey, and included more than a dozen of Fra Ilarione's original drawings, including maps and sketches of Mexican flora. Daily Life in Colonial Mexico is a welcome addition to the firsthand literature of New Spain.

This is the famous naturalist Thomas Nuttall's only surviving complete journal of his American scientific explorations. The account follows Nuttall's route from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, down the Ohio River to its mouth, then down the Mississippi River to the Arkansas Post, and up the Arkansas River with a side trip to the Red River. It is filled with valuable details on the plants, animals, and geology of the region, as well as penetrating observations of the resident Native tribes, the military establishment at Fort Smith, the arrival of the first governor of Arkansas Territory, and the beginnings of white settlement.Originally published in 1980 by the University of Oklahoma Press, this fine edited version of Nuttall's work boasts a valuable introduction, notes, maps, and bibliography by Savoie Lottinville.

In 1827 six Osage people - four men and two women - traveled to Europe escorted by three Americans. Their visit was big news in France, where three short publications about the travelers appeared almost immediately. Virtually lost since the 1830s, all three accounts are gathered, translated, and annotated here for the first time in English. Among the earliest writings devoted to Osage history and culture, these works provide unique insights into Osage life and especially into European perceptions of American Indians. William Least Heat-Moon's introduction poignantly tells of people leaving one alien nation, the United States, to visit an even more alien culture an ocean away. In France the Osages found themselves lionized as ""noble savages."" They went to the theater, rode in a hot-air balloon, and even had an audience with the king of France. Many Europeans ogled them as if they were exhibits in a freak show. As the entourage moved through Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, interest in the Osages declined. Soon they were reduced to begging in the suburbs of Paris, without the means to return home. Translated by Heat-Moon and James K. Wallace, the three featured texts are surprisingly accurate as basic descriptions of Osage history, geography, and lifeways. The French authors, influenced by racist and sexist expectations, misinterpreted some of the behaviors they describe. But they also dismiss rumors of cannibalism among the Osages and observe that ""the behavior of some whites . . . was not conducive to giving the Indians a favorable opinion of white morality."" An Osage Journey to Europe, 1827-1839 offers scholars and general readers both a compelling story and a singular glimpse into nineteenth-century cultural exchange.

Repeated clashes between American fur traders and the Plains Indians following the War of 1812 lent urgency to demands that the United States government protect its territory in the West. To remedy the situation, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun planned a military occupation of the upper Mississippi and Missouri River valleys through a cordon of army posts stretching from Green Bay on the Great Lakes west to Montana. Calhoun projected a troop movement, called the Yellowstone Expedition, that grew from one expedition to three - the Missouri, the Mississippi, and the Scientific Expeditions. The Missouri Expedition, described in this volume, was the first venture to implement Calhoun's plan.During the summer of 1818 the expedition, under the command of Colonel Thomas A. Smith, traveled up the Missouri River in keelboats to Cow Island, near present-day Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where a winter camp was built. Defiant bands of American Indians robbed the soldiers of horses, guns, boats, and food, also attacking white traders and messengers along the river. In February 1819, Calhoun appointed Colonel Henry Atkinson, the most experienced officer of the Rifle Regiment, to the command. By summer the troops continued upriver to Council Bluffs, where they built Cantonment Missouri.Expedition surgeon John Gale's account of the Missouri Expedition captures the color and excitement of exploration while revealing the grinding effort and stark hardship of army life in the early nineteenth century. Editor Roger L. Nichols, who established the authorship of the journal, includes expedition letters and military orders to enhance Gale's authentic narrative.

In Gilded Age America, Arctic explorers were fabulous celebrities - assured of riches and near-immortality so long as they reached the North Pole first. Of the many attempts to meet that goal, three American expeditions, launched from the Russian archipelago of Franz Josef Land, ended in abject failure, their exploits consigned to near-oblivion. Even so, these ventures - the Wellman expedition (1898-99), the Baldwin-Ziegler (1901-2), and the Fiala-Ziegler (1903-5) - have much to tell us about the personalities, politics, and economics of exploration in their day. In The Greatest Show in the Arctic, the first book to chronicle all three expeditions, P. J. Capelotti explores what went right and what, in the end, went tragically wrong.The cast of colorful characters from the Franz Josef Land forays included Walter Wellman, a Chicago journalist and bon vivant running from debts, his mistress, and an illegitimate daughter; Evelyn Briggs Baldwin, a deranged meteorologist with a fetish for balloons and a passion for Swedish conserves; and Anthony Fiala, a pious photographer in search of God in the Arctic. Featuring an international cast of supporting characters worthy of a three-ring circus, The Greatest Show in the Arctic follows each of the three expeditions in turn, from spectacular feats of financing to their bitter ends. Along the way, the explorers accumulated considerable geographic knowledge and left a legacy of place-names.Through close study of the expeditions' journals, Capelotti reveals that the Franz Josef Land endeavors foundered chiefly because of poor leadership and internal friction, not for lack of funding, as historians have previously suspected. Presenting tales of noble intentions, novel inventions, and epic miscalculations, The Greatest Show in the Arctic brings fresh life to a unique and underappreciated story of American exploration.

Joseph Reddeford Walker looms large in the lore of the early West. From the Missouri to the San Joaquin, from the Gila to the Yellowstone, Walker spent more than thirty years - from the 1830s to the Civil War - trapping beaver in the Rockies, bartering with the Crow, Ute, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, and Shoshone Indians, droving cattle and horses, and guiding emigrants and explorers.Walker was associated with Captain Bonneville in the fur trade from 1832 to 1835, but we have only an incomplete account these years in Washington Irving's, The Adventures of Captain Bonneville and Zenas Leonards, Narrative. But the twist of fate that threw Daniel Ellis Conner into Walker's party, en route from Colorado to explore Arizona in 1861, affords us several hundred manuscript pages, Conner's four-year travel diary, relating his hair-raising adventures with this great mountain man.Joseph Reddeford Walker and the Arizona Adventure offers a superb chapter in the history of the West. Included are tales of the early Apache wars in New Mexico and Arizona; ""The Betrayal of Mangas Coloradas,"" with Conner's eyewitness account of the Apache chief's death; the emigrant trains to California; early settlement; mining operations, in ""The Perils of Prospecting,"" and countless episodes of action and violence that make fictional accounts pale in comparison.

In 1875, a team of cartographers, geologists, and scientists under the direction of Ferdinand V. Hayden entered the Four Corners area for what they thought would be a calm summer's work completing a previous survey. Their accomplishments would go down in history as one of the great American surveying expeditions of the nineteenth century. By skillfully weaving the surveyors' diary entries, field notes, and correspondence with newspaper accounts, historians Robert S. McPherson and Susan Rhoades Neel bring the Hayden Survey to life. Mapping the Four Corners provides an entertaining, engaging narrative of the team's experiences, contextualized with a thoughtful introduction and conclusion.Accompanied by the great photographer William Henry Jackson, Hayden's team quickly found their trip to be more challenging than expected. The travelers describe wrangling half-wild pack mules, trying to sleep in rain-soaked blankets, and making tea from muddy, alkaline water. Along the way, they encountered diverse peoples, evidence of prehistoric civilizations, and spectacular scenery - Hispanic villages in Colorado and New Mexico; Mesa Verde, Hovenweep, and other Anasazi sites; and the Hopi mesas. Not everyone they met was glad to see them: in southeastern Utah surveyors fought and escaped a band of Utes and Paiutes who recognized that the survey meant dispossession from their homeland.Hayden saw his expedition as a scientific endeavor focused on geology, geographic description, cartographic accuracy, and even ethnography, but the search for economic potential was a significant underlying motive. As this book shows, these pragmatic scientists were on the lookout for gold beneath every rock, grazing lands in every valley, and economic opportunity around each bend in the trail. The Hayden Survey ultimately shaped the American imagination in contradictory ways, solidifying the idea of ""progress"" - and government funding of its pursuit - while also revealing, via Jackson's photographs, a landscape with a beauty hitherto unknown and unimagined.

In two decades of traveling throughout Mexico, Central America, and Europe, French priest Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg (1814-1874) amassed hundreds of indigenous manuscripts and printed books, including grammars and vocabularies that brought to light languages and cultures little known at the time. Although his efforts yielded many of the foundational texts of Mesoamerican studies - the pre-Columbian Codex Troana, the only known copies of the Popol Vuh and the indigenous dance drama Rabinal-Achi, and Diego De Landa's Relacián de la cosas de Yucatán - Brasseur earned disdain among scholars for his theories linking Maya writings to the mythical continent of Atlantis. In The Manuscript Hunter, translator Katia Sainson reasserts his standing as the founder of modern Maya studies, presenting three of his travel writings in English for the first time.While civil wars raged throughout Mexico and Central America and foreign interests sought access to the region's rich resources, Brasseur focused on uncovering Mesoamerica's mysterious past by examining its ancient manuscripts and living oral traditions. His ""Notes from a Voyage in Central America,"" ""From Guatemala City to Rabinal,"" and Voyage across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec document his travels in search of these texts and traditions. Brasseur's writings weave vivid geographical descriptions of Central America and Mexico during the mid-1800s with keen social and political analysis, all steeped in vast knowledge of the region's history and interest in its indigenous cultures.Coupled with Sainson's thoughtful introduction and annotations, these captivating, accessible accounts reveal Brasseur de Bourbourg's true accomplishments and offer an unrivaled view of the birth of Mesoamerican studies in the nineteenth century. Brasseur's writings not only depict Central America and Mexico through the eyes of a European traveler at a key moment, but also illuminate the remarkable efforts of one man to understand and preserve Mesoamerica's cultural traditions for all time.

In the spring and summer of 1875, Lt. Col. Richard Irving Dodge escorted the scientific expedition of geologist Walter P. Jenney into the Black Hills of the Dakotas to determine the truth of rumors of gold started by Gen. George Armstrong Custer the previous summer. The five-month trek north from Cheyenne, Wyoming, challenged Dodge's 452 men with their wagons and animals, but in many respects it was ""a delightful picnic (without the ladies),"" as Dodge described it.Colonel Dodge wrote his journals daily in the field, and in their variety, discursiveness, and detail they convey clearly the pleasure he took in what he said was ""the most delightful summer of my life."" Yet he used only a small fraction of what he recorded in his subsequent official communications and published works. If it were not for this well-annotated and illustrated edition by Wayne R. Kime, readers would not have access to Dodge's experiences with such characters as the stowaway Calamity Jane or the eccentric mountain man and backwoods philosopher California Joe, who was hired to guide the expedition. Dodge's particular interests in hunting, fishing, and fine scenery also enliven his narrative, as do the politics dividing the miners from the Indians, and the soldiers from the scientists on the expedition.Black Hills Journals of Colonel Richard Irving Dodge is by far the most detailed account yet available of the conflicting claims, interests, and populations that converged on the Black Hills during the key transitional period before the Great Sioux War of 1876.

In 1875, a team of cartographers, geologists, and scientists under the direction of Ferdinand V. Hayden entered the Four Corners area for what they thought would be a calm summer’s work completing a previous survey. Their accomplishments would go down in history as one of the great American surveying expeditions of the nineteenth century. By skillfully weaving the surveyors’ diary entries, field notes, and correspondence with newspaper accounts, historians Robert S. McPherson and Susan Rhoades Neel bring the Hayden Survey to life. Mapping the Four Corners provides an entertaining, engaging narrative of the team’s experiences, contextualized with a thoughtful introduction and conclusion.Accompanied by the great photographer William Henry Jackson, Hayden’s team quickly found their trip to be more challenging than expected. The travelers describe wrangling half-wild pack mules, trying to sleep in rain-soaked blankets, and making tea from muddy, alkaline water. Along the way, they encountered diverse peoples, evidence of prehistoric civilizations, and spectacular scenery-Hispanic villages in Colorado and New Mexico; Mesa Verde, Hovenweep, and other Anasazi sites; and the Hopi mesas. Not everyone they met was glad to see them: in southeastern Utah surveyors fought and escaped a band of Utes and Paiutes who recognized that the survey meant dispossession from their homeland.Hayden saw his expedition as a scientific endeavor focused on geology, geographic description, cartographic accuracy, and even ethnography, but the search for economic potential was a significant underlying motive. As this book shows, these pragmatic scientists were on the lookout for gold beneath every rock, grazing lands in every valley, and economic opportunity around each bend in the trail. The Hayden Survey ultimately shaped the American imagination in contradictory ways, solidifying the idea of “progress”-and government funding of its pursuit-while also revealing, via Jackson’s photographs, a landscape with a beauty hitherto unknown and unimagined.

When General Stephen Watts Kearny's Army of the West marched into Santa Fe, New Mexico, on August 18, 1846, Richard Smith Elliott, a young Missouri volunteer, was included in its ranks. In addition to Lieutenant Elliott's duties in the Laclede Rangers, he served as a regular correspondent to the St. Louis Reveille. An entertaining and educated observer, Elliott provided readers back home with an account of the grueling march over the famous Santa Fe Trail, the triumphant entry of the army into Santa Fe, the U.S. occupation of New Mexico, and the volunteers' eventual return to St. Louis.Noted southwestern scholars Mark L. Gardner and Marc Simmons present here, for the first time, all of Elliott's letters published in the Reveille under his nom-de-plume, John Brown, using passages from his autobiography for the same period to fill in a break resulting from a few missing letters. Also included are Elliott's literary sketches, drawn from his Mexican War experiences and the people he met and served with.