Few copies of the original 1834 edition of this volume are known to exist today. It is more than just a rare book, though; it is also a unique item of Southwestern Americana that defies classification as reminiscence, fiction, or poetry, for it is all of these.
In these literary forms Albert Pike became New Mexico's first Anglo-American short story writer and poet, and the narrative portion of his book is one of the earliest American travel accounts from the Mexican borderland.
Pike's restless nature led him to follow the Santa Fe trail at a historic period only ten years after its...

In this lively yet systematic commentary, a Welshman surveys the American Southwest with the steady, perceptive eye of a stranger who has grown to appreciate it. He finds in its history and topography signs that nature still holds its own against the human hand. "One is aware that such immense landscapes must exist--but until one views them for oneself it is impossible to grasp their impressiveness, or experience their liberating quality."
White is equally fascinated with the people who have moved across this spectacular stage and those who inhabit it now. Trained as an anthropologist and...

In 1925, when Rollie Burns turned sixty-eight, like many old-timers he decided it was time to write down his reminiscences of a long, full life on the West Texas plains. Born in 1857 in Missouri, he had been brought to Texas by his parents about the beginning of the Civil War, and he grew up near Denison, then the only shipping point on the cattle trail north and a fascinating place for boys who were to become cowboys. One month short of his sixteenth birthday Burns ran away from home to join a scouting expedition to the Texas Panhandle, and by the time he settled in the Lubbock area in 1881,...

"The lowing of Texan cows is not very musical..." English traveler Mary Jaques wrote in 1894 in a charming, vividly detailed account of her two-year stay in Texas, with side trips to Canada and Mexico. J. Frank Dobie once claimed that "the English write our best Western books," and Jaques' account bears him out. Out of print for some ninety years, this collector's classic will delight and inform, entertain and amuse.
So taken with Texas that she bought a twenty-five acre spread with "a dear little one-roomed cottage," Mary Jaques entered into the frontier life around Junction City with...