This brief journal, written for the author's wife and father, describes a three- week trip from Rochester, New York to southern Michigan by way of the Great Lakes. Swan's business seems to have been the manufacture of soda water, and he visited some drug stores in Detroit in order to promote his wares. After a brief stop in Ypsilanti, he spent the weekend in Ann Arbor, where he attended church. He then took a stage for Jackson, Marshall and the Genesee Prairies (near Kalamazoo), where he visited a sister and brother. In Michigan he also stopped at Summerville, Niles, La Porte Prairie, White Pidgeon Prairie, Clinton, and Saline. Swan writes enthusiastically about the prairies' wildflowers and abundant natural beauty, and describes life aboard Great Lakes steamers in some detail. He also voices candid opinions about women, food, and the discomforts of travel.

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First published in 1961, Early Midwestern Travel Narratives records and describes first-person records of journeys in the frontier and early settlement periods which survive in both manuscript and print. Geographically, it deals with the states once part of the Old Northwest Territory-Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota-and with Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. Robert Hubach arranged the narratives in chronological order and makes the distinction among diaries (private records, with contemporaneously dated entries), journals (non-private records with contemporaneously dated entries), and "accounts," which are of more literary, descriptive nature. Early Midwestern Travel Narratives remains to this day a unique comprehensive work that fills a long existing need for a bibliography, summary, and interpretation of these early Midwestern travel narratives.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1882.