Antonio Maria Osio's La Historia de Alta California was the first written history of upper California during the era of Mexican rule, and this is its first complete English translation. A Mexican-Californian, government official, and the landowner of Angel Island and Point Reyes, Osio writes colorfully of life in old Monterey, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and gives a first-hand account of the political intrigues of the 1830s that led to the appointment of Juan Bautista Alvarado as governor.
Osio wrote his History in 1851, conveying with immediacy and detail the years of...

By 1870, only one group of American Indians in the 300,000 square miles of the Dakota and Montana Territories still held firm against being placed on reservations: a few thousand Teton Sioux and Northern Cheyennes, all followers of the charismatic Sitting Bull. It was then that Philadelphia's Jay Cooke, "the financier of the Civil War," a man who believed that he was "God's chosen instrument," funded a second transcontinental railroad. This line, the Northern Pacific, would follow the Yellowstone River through Montana, separating the last buffalo herds from Sitting Bull's people...

When in the early 1870s historian Hubert Howe Bancroft sent interviewers out to gather oral histories from the pre-statehood gentry of California, he didn t count on one thing: the women. When the men weren t available, the interviewers collected the stories of the women of the household sometimes almost as an afterthought. These interviews were eventually archived at the University of California, though many were all but forgotten. Testimonios presents thirteen women s firsthand accounts from the days when California was part of Spain and Mexico. Having lived through the gold rush and...

This copious collection of reminiscences, reports, letters, and documents allows readers to experience the vast and varied landscape of early California from the viewpoint of its inhabitants. What emerges is not the Spanish California depicted by casual visitors a culture obsessed with finery, horses, and fandangos but an ever-shifting world of aspiration and tragedy, pride and loss. Conflicts between missionaries and soldiers, Indians and settlers, friends and neighbors spill from these pages, bringing the ferment of daily life into sharp focus."