This book is a collection of letters written by James Marsh Read (1833-1865) to his family in Winooski, Vermont and their replies to him. After graduation from the University of Vermont, he joined a US Geological Survey team that spent three years in Texas and New Mexico trying to find underground water to facilitate travel to California. Fascinated by the desert, enthusiastic about all he was learning, he writes to parents, sisters and brothers about his first adventure. After a brief interval as assistant to the editor of a Burlington, Vermont, newspaper, he answers Lincoln's first call for...