The Prairie Traveller: A Handbook for Overland Expediations, with Maps, Illustrations and Itineraries of the Principal Routes Between the Mississippi and the Pacific (Classics of the Old West series)

xiv, 15-342pp, with numerous full page black and white illustrations and fold out map of routes at end of volume. A facsimile reprint of the original 1859 publication. Bound in full brown leather with blind embossed decorations and gilt lettering front and spine. All edges gilt. Marbled endpapers. Yellow satin ribbon marker bound in. 8vo. Boards very slightly rounded on corners. Original leaflet from the publisher, giving details of Randolph Marcy and his writing, loosely laid in, together with an original, unused ‘classics of the old west’ ex libris bookplate. Except for cookery books and compilations of moral maxims, The Prairie Trader is one of the earliest examples of that great American literary genre, the do-it-yourself book. What contemporary reader’s of Marcy’s tome were doing was quite literally was learning how to engage the quintessentially American enterprise – going West in the 19th century. It reveals the best way to get wagons across rivers and the deep differences among the tribes of Indians encounters, from how to hunt and plains cooking. A beautiful book