J. _A Thrilling and Truthful History of the Pony
Express_, Chicago, 1908. OP. Not excessively "thrilling."

20. Surge of Life in the West

THE WANDERINGS of Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, De Soto, and La Salle had
long been chronicled, although the chronicles had not been popularized
in English, when in 1804 Captain Meriwether Lewis and Captain William
Clark set out to explore not only the Louisiana Territory, which had
just been purchased for the United States by President Thomas Jefferson,
but on west to the Pacific. Their _Journals_, published in 1814,
initiated a series of chronicles comparable in scope, vitality, and
manhood adventure to the great collection known as _Hakluyt's Voyages_.

Between 1904 and 1907 Reuben Gold Thwaites, one of the outstanding
editors of the English-speaking world, brought out in thirty-two volumes
his epic _Early Western Travels_. This work includes the Lewis and Clark
_Journals_, every student of the West, whether Northwest or Southwest,
goes to the collection sooner or later. It is a commentary on the
values of life held by big rich boasters of patriotism in the West that
virtually all the chronicles in the collection remain out of print.

An important addendum to the Thwaites collection of _Early Western
Travels_ is "The Southwest Historical Series," edited by Ralph
P. Bieber--twelve volumes, published 1931-43, by Clark, Glendale,
California.

The stampede to California that began in 1849 climaxed all migration
orgies of the world in its lust for gold; but the lust for gold was
merely one manifestation of a mighty population's lust for life.
Railroads raced each other to cross the continent. Ten million Longhorns
were going up the trails; from Texas while the last of a hundred million
buffaloes, killed in herds--the greatest slaughter in history--were
being skinned. Dodge City was the Cowboy Capital of the world, and
Chicago was becoming "hog butcher of the world." Miller and Lux were
expanding their ranges so that, as others boasted, their herds could
trail from Oregon to Baja California and bed down every night on Miller
and Lux's own grass.

Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832-1918) was massing in San Francisco at his
own expense the greatest assemblage of historical documents any one
individual ever assembled. While his interviewers and note-takers sorted
down tons of manuscript, he was employing a corps of historians to write
what, at first designed as a history of the Pacific s