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.