Western history is all the richer thanks to LeRoy and Ann Hafen, who have assembled a fascinating array of diaries and memoirs of forty-niners who set out from Salt Lake City toward California?s gold fields over the Old Spanish Trail. For many would-be gold miners, this dry, dangerous route was preferable to crossing the Sierra Nevada. The Donner party disaster was only three years old and fresh in the minds of many. In reality, the choice of the southern route did not ease travelers? efforts. The unremitting heat and lack of water killed more people and animals than the snows of the mountains. Jacob Stover?s narrative provides fine descriptions of these challenges, especially the difficulty in transporting supplies. Of added interest is the journal of Henry Bigler, a former member of the Mormon Battalion, who was the first person to record Marshall?s discovery of gold at Sutter?s Mill.

Chauncey de Leon Canfield (1843-1909) first published "The diary of a forty-niner" in 1906, and 1,200 of the 2,000 copies in that edition were burned. Joseph Gaer's Bibliography of California literature describes this book as written in the form of a diary, but fictional. The diary of a forty-niner (1920) reprints Canfield's 1906 publication. It purports to be the diary of Alfred T. Jackson, of Litchfield County, Connecticut, during his days as a gold prospector, 1850-1852. Jackson offers first-hand accounts of Nevada City and neighboring Rock Creek; descriptions of Grass Valley, North and South Yuba Valleys, and the Sierra Mountains; details of gold mining with accounts of pioneer overland crossings, and foreign mineworkers (including Chinese). Entries concerning Jackson's personal life include details of his courtship of a French woman in the camps.

Drawing upon more than one hundred unpublished diaries, Schultz profiles the individuals who embarked on these journeys and demonstrates how markedly the gold rush voyages differed from general commercial trading and whaling ventures."--BOOK JACKET.

William Lewis Manly was a forty-niner, explorer, and humanitarian whose story most people have never heard. Born in Vermont, William Lewis Manly was drawn out west by the lure of gold. Previous scholarship claims that the Yankee frontiersman floated only 290 miles down the Green River to the Uinta Basin, but author Michael D. Kane’s research of primary source materials led him to the conclusion that Manly actually traveled 415 miles, all the way to what is now Green River, Utah. This would make Manly the first to explore much of the Green River by boat—twenty years before John Wesley Powell’s famous expedition. Determined to prove his theory and establish Manly’s legacy as a trailblazer, Kane conducted research and then built his own wooden canoes and made the trip, tracing Manly’s footsteps and comparing notes with the earlier traveler. Country Never Trod follows Manly’s little-known expedition down the Green River and his overland trek through some of the most desolate stretches of Utah, interspersed with Kane’s journal entries and photographs documenting his own trip.

The most honored book ever released by the University of Illinois Press, The Plains Across was the result of more than a decade's work by its author. Here, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Oregon Trail, is a paperback reissue that includes the notes, bibliography, and illustrations contained in the 1979 cloth edition.

Over 200 writings about Nevada with selections from Native American tales to contemporary writings on urban experience and environmental concerns. The state of Nevada embodies paradox and contradiction—home to one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation and to isolated ranches scattered across a sparsely populated backcountry. Nevada is a place where the lust for sudden wealth has prompted both wild mining booms and glittering casinos, and where forbidding atomic test sites coexist with alluring tourist meccas. The variety and distinctiveness of Nevada’s landscape and peoples have inspired writers from the beginning of immigrant contact with the region. This contact has produced abundant literary wealth that includes the rich oral traditions of Native American peoples and an amazing spectrum of contemporary voices. Literary Nevada is the first comprehensive literary anthology of Nevada. It contains over 200 selections ranging from traditional Native American tales, explorers’ and emigrants’ accounts, and writing from the Comstock Lode and other mining boomtowns, as well as compelling fiction, poetry, and essays from throughout the state’s history. There is work by well-known Nevada writers such as Sarah Winnemucca, Mark Twain, and Robert Laxalt, by established and emerging writers from all parts of the state, and by some nonresident authors whose work illuminates important facets of the Nevada experience. The book includes cowboy poetry, travel writing, accounts of nuclear Nevada, narratives about rural life and urban life in Las Vegas and Reno, poetry and fiction from the state’s best contemporary writers, and accounts of the special beauty of wild Nevada’s mountains and deserts. Editor Cheryll Glotfelty provides insightful introductions to each section and author. The book also includes a photo gallery of selected Nevada writers and a generous list of suggested further readings. Nevada has inspired an exceptionally rich panorama of fine writing and a dazzling array of literary voices. The selections in Literary Nevada will engage and delight readers while revealing the complex and exciting diversity of the state’s history, people, and life.