£454
Rare Books, Manuscripts, Maps & Photographs | 739
Auction: 21 June 2023 at 11:00 BST
London: Longman, Green [&c.], 1861. First edition, 8vo, half-title, frontispiece, 3 maps on 1 folding sheet, 8 plates and plans (1 folding), text illustrations, contemporary green half morocco, spine gilt, 19th century bookplate of Thomas William Beaves [Sabin 9497]
Note: Edward in his excellent biography of Richard Burton noted "the book is a a rare account by an experienced traveller who was alert to every detail, to language, to the nuances of a dynamic developing nation that showed high civilization on its eastern coast and progressive barbarism as one travelled westward. Here are emigrants, soldiers, desperadoes, wanderers, frontier women, Indian tribes, government officials, rascals and saints, the inevitable pretty girls (white and Indian alike). Social conditions, perceptions about democracy, advice to the army about dealing with the aborigines (the Indians were like a sort of Bedawin to Burton), lists of routes and way stops, the legal system and frontier justice, analyses of raw materials and alkaline waters, the sources of rivers, the weather, soil conditions - it is mid century America in five hundred pages and appendixes and rarely dull".