THE WANDERINGS of Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, De Soto, and La Salle had
long been chronicled, although the chronicles had not been popularized
in English, when in 1804 Captain Meriwether Lewis and Captain William
Clark set out to explore not only the Louisiana Territory, which had
just been purchased for the United States by President Thomas Jefferson,
but on west to the Pacific. Their _Journals_, published in 1814,
initiated a series of chronicles comparable in scope, vitality, and
manhood adventure to the great collection known as _Hakluyt's Voyages_.
Between 1904 and 1907 Reuben Gold Thwaites, one of the outstanding
editors of the English-speaking world, brought out in thirty-two volumes
his epic _Early Western Travels_. This work includes the Lewis and Clark
_Journals_, every student of the West, whether Northwest or Southwest,
goes to the collection sooner or later. It is a commentary on the
values of life held by big rich boasters of patriotism in the West that
virtually all the chronicles in the collection remain out of print.
An important addendum to the Thwaites collection of _Early Western
Travels_ is "The Southwest Historical Series," edited by Ralph
P. Bieber--twelve volumes, published 1931-43, by Clark, Glendale,
California.
The stampede to California that began in 1849 climaxed all migration
orgies of the world in its lust for gold; but the lust for gold was
merely one manifestation of a mighty population's lust for life.
Railroads raced each other to cross the continent. Ten million Longhorns
were going up the trails; from Texas while the last of a hundred million
buffaloes, killed in herds--the greatest slaughter in history--were
being skinned. Dodge City was the Cowboy Capital of the world, and
Chicago was becoming "hog butcher of the world." Miller and Lux were
expanding their ranges so that, as others boasted, their herds could
trail from Oregon to Baja California and bed down every night on Miller
and Lux's own grass.
Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832-1918) was massing in San Francisco at his
own expense the greatest assemblage of historical documents any one
individual ever assembled. While his interviewers and note-takers sorted
down tons of manuscript, he was employing a corps of historians to write
what, at first designed as a history of the Pacific states, grew in
twenty-eight volumes to embrace also Alaska, British Columbia, Texas,
Mexico, and Central America, aside from five volumes on the Native Races
and six volumes of essays. Meantime he was printing these volumes
in sets of thousands and selling them through an army of agents that
covered America.
Collis P. Huntington (1821-1900) was building the Southern Pacific
Railroad into a network, interlocked with other systems and steamship
lines, not only enveloping California land but also the whole economic
and political life of that and other states, with headquarters in the
U.S. Congress. Then his nephew, Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927),
taking over his wealth and power, was building gardens at San Marino,
California, collecting art, books, and manuscripts to make, without
benefit of any institution of learning and in defiance of all the slow
processes of tradition found at Oxford and Harvard, a Huntington
Library and a Huntington Art Gallery that, set down amid the most costly
botanical profusion imaginable, now rival the world's finest.
The dreams were of empire. Old men and young toiled as "terribly" as
mighty Raleigh. The "spacious times" of Queen Elizabeth seemed, indeed,
to be translated to another sphere, though here the elements that went
into the mixture were less diverse. Boom methods of Gargantuan scale
were applied to cultural factors as well as to the physical. Few men
stopped to reflect that while objects of art may be bought by the
wholesale, the development of genuine culture is too intimately personal
and too chemically blended with the spiritual to be bartered for. The
Huntingtons paid a quarter of a million dollars for Gainsborough's "The
Blue Boy." It is very beautiful. Meanwhile the mustang grapevine waits
for some artist to paint the strong and lovely grace of its drapery and
thereby to enrich for land-dwellers every valley where it hangs over elm
or oak.
Most of the books in this section could be placed in other sections.
Many have been. They represent the vigor, vitality, energy, and daring
characteristic of our frontiers. To quote Harvey Fergusson's phrase, the
adventures of mettle have always had "a tension that would not let them
rest."
BARKER, EUGENE C. _The Life of Stephen F. Austin_, Dallas, 1925.
Republished by Texas State Historical Association, Austin. Iron-wrought
biography of the leader in making Texas Anglo-American.
BELL, HORACE. _Reminiscences of a Ranger, or Early Times in California_,
Los Angeles, 1881; reprinted, but OP. In this book and in _On the Old
West Coast_, Bell caught the lift and spiritedness of life-hungry men.
BIDWELL, JOHN (1819-1900). _Echoes of the Past_, Chico, California
(about 1900). Bidwell got to California several years before gold was
discovered. He became foremost citizen and entertained scientists,
writers, scholars, and artists at his ranch home. His brief accounts
of the trip across the plains and of pioneer society in California are
graphic, charming, telling. The book goes in and out of print but is not
likely to die.
BILLINGTON, RAY ALLEN. _Westward Expansion: A History of the American
Frontier_, Macmillan, New York, 1949. This Alpha to Omega treatise
concludes with a seventy-five-page, double-column, fine-print
bibliography which not only lists but comments upon most books and
articles of any consequence that have been published on frontier
history.
BOURKE, JOHN G. _On the Border with Crook_, New York, 1891. Now
published by Long's College Book Co., Columbus, Ohio. Bourke had an
eager, disciplined mind, at once scientific and humanistic; he had
imagination and loyalty to truth and justice; he had a strong body
and joyed in frontier exploring. He was a captain in the army but had
nothing of the littleness of the army mind exhibited by Generals Nelson
Miles and O. O. Howard in their egocentric reminiscences. I rank his
book as the meatiest and richest of all books dealing with campaigns
against Indians. In its amplitude it includes the whole frontier.
General George Crook was a wise, generous, and noble man, but his
_Autobiography_ (edited by Martin F. Schmitt; University of Oklahoma
Press) lacks that power in writing necessary to turn the best subject
on earth into a good book and capable also, as Darwin demonstrated, of
turning earthworms into a classic.
BURNHAM, FREDERICK RUSSELL. _Scouting on Two Continents_, New York,
1926; reprinted, Los Angeles, 1942. A brave book of enthralling
interest. The technique of scouting in the Apache Country is illuminated
by that of South Africa in the Boer War. Hunting for life, Major Burnham
carried it with him. OP.
DEVOTO, BERNARD. _The Year of Decision 1846_, Houghton Mifflin, Boston,
1943. Critical interpretation as well as depiction. The Mexican War,
New Mexico, California, Mountain Men, etc. DeVoto's _Across the Wide
Missouri_ is wider in spirit, less bound to political complexities. See
under "Mountain Men."
EMORY, LIEUTENANT COLONEL WILLIAM H. _Notes of a Military Reconnaissance
from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri, to San Diego, in California,
including Part of the Arkansas, Del Norte, and Gila Rivers_, Washington,
1848. Emory's own vivid report is only one item in _Executive Document
No. 41_, 30th Congress, 1st Session, with which it is bound. Lieutenant
J. W. Albert's _Journal_ and additional _Report on New Mexico_, St.
George Cooke's Odyssey of his march from Santa Fe to San Diego, another
_Journal_ by Captain A. R. Johnson, the Torrey-Englemann report on
botany, illustrated with engravings, all go to make this one of the
meatiest of a number of meaty government publications. The Emory part of
it has been reprinted by the University of New Mexico Press, under title
of _Lieutenant Emory Reports_, Introduction and Notes by Ross Calvin,
Albuquerque, 1951.
Emory's great two-volume _Report on United States and Mexican Boundary
Survey_, Washington 1857 and 1859, is, aside from descriptions of
borderlands and their inhabitants, a veritable encyclopedia, wonderfully
illustrated, on western flora and fauna. United States Commissioner
on this Boundary Survey (following the Mexican War) was John Russell
Bartlett. While exploring from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific and
far down into Mexico, he wrote _Personal Narrative of Explorations
and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora and Chihuahua_.
published in two volumes, New York, 1854. For me very little rewritten
history has the freshness and fascination of these strong, firsthand
personal narratives, though I recognize many of them as being the stuff
of literature rather than literature itself.
FOWLER, JACOB. _The Journal of Jacob Fowler, 1821-1822_, edited by
Elliott Coues, New York, 1898. Hardly another chronicle of the West is
so Defoe-like in homemade realism, whether on Indians and Indian horses
or Negro Paul's experience with the Mexican "Lady" at San Fernando de
Taos. Should be reprinted.
GAMBRELL, HERBERT. _Anson Jones: The Last President of Texas_, Garden
City, New York, 1948; now distributed by Southern Methodist University
Press, Dallas, Texas. Anson Jones was more surged over than surgent.
Infused with a larger comprehension than that behind many a world
figure, this biography of a provincial figure is perhaps the most
artfully written that Texas has produced. It goes into the soul of the
man.
HOBBS, JAMES. _Wild Life in the Far West_, Hartford, 1872. Hobbs saw
just about all the elephants and heard just about all the owls to be
seen and heard in the Far West including western Mexico. Should be
reprinted.
HULBERT, ARCHER BUTLER. _Forty-Niners: The Chronicle of the California
Trail_, Little, Brown, Boston, 1931. Hulbert read exhaustively in
the exhausting literature by and about the gold hunters rushing to
California. Then he wove into a synthetic diary the most interesting
and illuminating records on happenings, characters, ambitions, talk,
singing, the whole life of the emigrants.
IRVING, WASHINGTON. Irving made his ride into what is now Oklahoma in
1832. He had recently returned from a seventeen-year stay in Europe and
was a mature literary man--as mature as a conforming romanticist could
become Prairie life refreshed him. A _Tour on the Prairies_, published
in 1835, remains refreshing. It is illuminated by _Washington Irving
on the Prairie; or, A Narrative of the Southwest in the Year 1832_, by
Henry Leavitt Ellsworth (who accompanied Irving), edited by Stanley
T. Williams and Barbara D. Simison, New York, 1937; by _The Western
Journals of Washington Irving_, excellently edited by John Francis
McDermott, Norman, Oklahoma, 1944; and by Charles J. Latrobe's _The
Rambler in North America, 1832-1833_, New York, 1835.
JAMES, MARQUIS. _The Raven_, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1929. Graphic
life of Sam Houston.
KURZ, RUDOLPH FRIEDERICH. _Journal of Rudolph Friederich Kurz: ... His
Experiences among Fur Traders and American Indians on the Mississippi
and Upper Missouri Rivers, during the Years of 1846-1852_, U.S. Bureau
of Ethnology Bulletin 115, Washington, 1937. The public has not had a
chance at this book, which was printed rather than published. Kurz both
saw and recorded with remarkable vitality. He was an artist and the
volume contains many reproductions of his paintings and drawings. One of
the most readable and illuminating of western journals.
LEWIS, OSCAR. _The Big Four_, New York, 1938. Railroad magnates.
LOCKWOOD, FRANK C. _Arizona Characters_, Los Angeles, California, 1928.
Fresh sketches of representative men. The book deserves to be better
known than it is. OP.
LYMAN, GEORGE D. _John Marsh Pioneer_, New York, 1930. Prime biography
and prime romance. Laid mostly in California. This book almost heads the
list of all biographies of western men. OP.
PARKMAN, FRANCIS. _The Oregon Trail_, 1849. Parkman knew how to write
but some other penetrators of the West put down about as much. School
assignments have made his book a recognized classic.
PATTIE, JAMES O. _Personal Narrative_, Cincinnati, 1831; reprinted,
but OP. Positively gripping chronicle of life in New Mexico and the
Californias during Mexican days.
PIKE, ZEBULON M. _The Southwestern Expedition of Zebulon M. Pike_,
Philadelphia, 1810. The 1895 edition edited by Elliott Coues is the most
useful to students. No edition is in print. Pike's explorations of the
Southwest (1806-7) began while the great Lewis and Clark expedition
(1804-6) was ending. His journal is nothing like so informative as
theirs but is just as readable. _The Lost Pathfinder_ is a biography of
Pike by W. Eugene Hollon, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1949.
TWAIN, MARK. _Roughing It_, 1872. Mark Twain was a man who wrote and not
merely a writer in man-form. He was frontier American in all his fibers.
He was drunk with western life at a time when both he and it were
standing on tiptoe watching the sun rise over the misty mountain tops,
and he wrote of what he had seen and lived before he became too sober.
_Roughing It_ comes nearer catching the energy, the youthfulness, the
blooming optimism, the recklessness, the lust for the illimitable in
western life than any other book. It deals largely with mining life, but
the surging vitality of this life as reflected by Mark Twain has been
the chief common denominator of all American frontiers and was as
characteristic of Texas "cattle kings" when grass was free as of
Virginia City "nabobs" in bonanza.