"Basic Americana... as important as the Lewis and Clark Journals" — Sol Tax
This volume is a panorama of the American West. The pen of anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and the brush and color of the great Indian painters—Bodmer, McKenney and Hall, Catlin, and Lewis—here recapture the tumult of the raw frontier: braves, murderers, half-breeds, missionaries, honorary "colonels" and their dusky Indian wives. In May 1959, on the eve of the Civil War, Morgan left his home in Rochester, New York, and set out for the Plains. By steamboat and stagecoach, on horseback and on foot, he travelec through the Nebraska and Kansas territories, down the Red River of the North into the Hudson Bay area, and up the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains. This account of his journeys is a vivid first-hand report of life on the American frontier, a rare document of American history. After remaining in manuscript for a century, it is here published for the first time. More than a book of adventure, it is also a trenchant description of the white man's ways in dealing with the American Indian. Leslie A. White, one of the outstanding anthropologists of our day, provides a full introduction to the life and times of Morgan and copious notes to the Journals.