Josiah Gregg and His Vision of the Early West

New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1979. First Printing Stated . Hard Back. Fine/Good. 5 1/2" x 8 1/2. 116 Pages Indexed. Book is in beautiful gift quality condition with attractive red endpapers. Dust jacket price 8.95 and beside it penciled in is 2.49. There is a quarter inch closed tear at the bottom spine area. The fame of Josiah Gregg, a native of Tennessee, rests chiefly on his classic account of the Santa Fe Trail, Commerce of the Prairies (1844), a ground-breaking work in the historiography of the American West. Six years after its publication, when Gregg had just completed a dangerous and arduous journey to the California coast, he died. Yet little was known of Gregg, the man, until his newly discovered notebooks, diaries, and letters were first published in the 1940s, together with a long biographical essay by Paul Horgan entitled "Josiah Gregg Himself." In the present volume, Mr. Horgan presents a revised version of this biographical portrait, long out of print. He adds to it an interpretation and analysis of Commerce of the Prairies, appearing here for the first time in book form. In combining this material for the present work, Mr. Horgan has recast it in four sections-"To the Prairies," "American Facts," "To Mexico," and "To Mad River and the End." The result, by a distinguished historian who has been awarded both the Bancroft and the Pulitzer Prizes in History, is a book which throws fresh light on this little-known American figure. As Mr. Horgan concludes: "When Gregg was born in 1806, there was no organized civil life west of the Mississippi. When he died in 1850, four great paths had reached the Pacific. In his short lifetime, forty-four years, the United States achieved its continental design; and he was among the men who helped this to happen.