Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1989, Hardback, Book Condition: Very Good, First

Fine cloth copy in a near-fine, very slightly edge-nicked and dust-dulled dw, now mylar-sleeved. Remains particularly and surprisingly well-preserved overall; tight, bright, clean and strong.; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 280 pages; Description: xxxi, 280 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. Subjects: Parke, Charles Ross, 1823-1908 --Diaries. Pioneers --West (U.S.) --Diaries. California --United States --Description and travel. Summary: With a high sense of adventure and even higher hope of profit, Dr. Charles Ross Parke joined the gold seekers streaming toward California in the spring of 1849. A resident of Whiteside Country, Illinois, he formed a small company and headed west to the Great Platte River Road. Other forty-niners kept diaries of daily events on the trail, but Dr. Parke's is unusual in its scope and detail. Edited and annotated by James E. Davis and published for the first times, Dreams to Dust: A Diary of the California Gold Rush, 1849-1850 reveals an anthropologist's curiosity about Indians and their culture, a young man's eye for the ladies, a sociologist's sense of the roles people play, a politician's instincts for the art of governance, and a doctor's view of the cholera pandemic along the trail. 280 pages. ISBN: 0803236743. ISBN/EAN: 9780803236745. Inventory No: 190119.