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.