1800-1860: Business and the Economy: Publications

Nicholas Biddle, History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, 2 volumes, edited by Paul Allen (Philadelphia: Bradford & Inskeep / New York: Abm. H. Inskeep, J. Maxwell, printer, 1814)—the journals of America’s most famous Western explorers, who were to investigate possible U.S. participation in the fur trade. Among many other things, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark described features of the economies of the Native Americans of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Pacific Northwest;

Sir Richard Burton, The City of the Saints and Across the Rocky Mountains to California (London: Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts, 1861; New York: Harper, 1862)—this less than flattering portrait of the Far West in 1860 describes the bison, Native Americans, landscapes, and trading posts Burton encountered between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California;

Mirriam Davis Colt, Went to Kansas (Watertown, N.Y.: Ingalls, 1862)—a published diary of a woman and her family from upstate New York who decided to homestead in southeastern Kansas in 1856. It describes the many difficulties facing early Kansas pioneers, including obtaining food and being unable to work because of malaria. It is an account of a family that failed to succeed in the West;

Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies: or, The Journal of a Santa Fe Trader (New York: H. G. Langley, 1844)—a description of the Santa Fe trade between Missouri and New Mexico. Gregg’s popular work reports on the people, geography, plants, and animals of the Southwest and the Plains in the 1830s and 1840s;

James Ohio Pattie, The Personal Narrative of James Ohio Pattie (Cincinnati: John H. Wood, 1831)—an exciting, if not always accurate, tale of a trapper’s six-year adventure in what was then Mexico’s northern frontier. Pattie describes the difficulties faced by an American interloper in a region owned and controlled by Mexico and occupied by various native groups.