18 books like Life on the plains and among the diggings
The adventures of a forty-niner
An Albany, New York, physician, Daniel Knower (b. ca. 1818) sailed for California in 1849 with twelve prefabricated frame houses for the San Francisco market. The adventures of a forty-niner (1894) describes Knower's business and real estate speculations in San Francisco as well as an extended visit to a mining camp near Coloma and the life of prospectors there.
Shares: Real estate development, Gold discoveries, Description and travel, Business
Tales of Aztlan
With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.
Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We…
Shares: Pioneers, Frontier and pioneer life
The Quick and the Dead
When Duncan McKaskel decided to move his family west, he knew he would face dangers, and he was prepared for them. He knew about the exhausting terrain, and he was expecting the punishing elements. What he worried about was having to use violence against other men--men who would follow him and try to steal the riches that he didn't even possess.Yet bandits were only part of McKaskel's worries.…
Shares: Overland journeys to the Pacific, Frontier and pioneer life
![Cover of Three years in California [1846-1849]](/covers/6119339.jpg)
Three years in California [1846-1849]
Walter Colton (1797-1851) of Vermont had a career as clergyman and journalist before sailing to California as naval chaplain of the Congress. In July 1846, Commodore Stockton named him alcalde of Monterey, a post to which he was elected a few months later. He remained in California until 1849, using his time to found the state's first newspaper and building its first schoolhouse. Three years in…
Shares: Gold discoveries, Mines and mineral resources, Description and travel, Business
An overland journey
The following letters, as is generally known, were written to The New York Tribune during a journey through Kansas, Utah, and California, last summer.
No one can be more conscious than the writer that they present the slightest possible claims to literary merit or enduring interest. Their place is among the thousand ephemeral productions of the press on which the reading public, if good-natured,…
Shares: Overland journeys to the Pacific, Frontier and pioneer life, Description and travel, Travel
Poems
Interspersed are passages from the author's "Essays" and "Journal".
Shares: Mines and mineral resources, Description and travel
Narrative of the adventures of Zenas Leonard
Zenas Leonard left his parents’ home in Pennsylvania in the early 1830’s to seek his fortune in the West. They did not hear from him for more than five years, and he was presumed dead. Then one day he showed up at their door, fresh from the Rocky Mountains. Everyone was eager to hear his story, so he wrote it down, first publishing part of it in a local newspaper, and later the entire account as…
Shares: Overland journeys to the Pacific, Indians of North America, Description and travel, Biography & Memoir
The Cumberland Bride
"Thomas Bledsoe and Kate Gruener are traveling the Wilderness Road when conflicts between natives and settlers reach a peak that will require each of them to tap into a well of courage. A brand new series for fans of all things related to history, romance, adventure, faith, and family trees. Love and Adventure Are Discovered on the Wilderness Road In 1794, when Kate Gruener's father is ready to…
Shares: Pioneers, Frontier and pioneer life
The Lands of the Saracen
This volume comprises the second portion of a series of travels. This work includes author's adventure travels in Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Sicily and Spain.
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Journey Without Maps
This is an account of a trip Graham Greene made in 1935 with his cousin, Barbara Greene, through the previously unexplored interior of Liberia. It was an extremely uncomfortable journey, with Greene falling seriously ill halfway through the trip. Possibly as a result of this he also made a point of noting the many illnesses with which the local inhabitants were assailed, particularly malaria and…
Shares: Description and travel, Travel
The Pathfinder
Vigorous, self-reliant, amazingly resourceful, and moral, Natty Bumppo is the prototype of the Western hero. A faultless arbiter of wilderness justice, he hates middle-class hypocrisy. But he finds his love divided between the woman he has pledged to protect on a treacherous journey and the untouched forest that sustains him in his beliefs. A fast-paced narrative full of adventure and majestic…
Shares: Pioneers, Indians of North America, Frontier and pioneer life
Backwoods of Canada
The toils, troubles, and satisfactions of pioneer life are recorded with charm and vivacity on The Backwoods of Canada, by Catherine Parr Traill, who, like her sister Susanna Moodie, left the comforts of genteel English society for the rigours of a new, young land. Traill offers a vivid and honest account of her trip to North America and of her first two and a helf years living in the bush…
Shares: Indians of North America, Frontier and pioneer life, Description and travel, Travel
California and Oregon trail
Presents accounts of a young man's travels on the Oregon Trail and his sojourn with the Oglala Indians.
Shares: Indians of North America, Frontier and pioneer life, Description and travel, Travel
Roughing It
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), better known as "Mark Twain," left Missouri in 1861 to work with his brother, the newly appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory. Once settled in Nevada, Clemens fell victim to gold fever and went to the Humboldt mines. When prospecting lost its attractions, Clemens found work as a reporter in Virginia City. In 1864, Clemens moved to California and worked…
Shares: Mines and mineral resources, Description and travel, Travel, Business
Jubal Sackett
In Jubal Sackett, the second generation of Louis L'Amour's great American family pursues a destiny in the wilderness of a sprawling new land. Jubal Sackett's urge to explore drove him westward, and when a Natchez priest asks him to undertake a nearly impossible quest, Sackett ventures into the endless grassy plains the Indians call the Far Seeing Lands. He seeks a Natchez exploration party and…
Shares: Pioneers, Indians of North America, Frontier and pioneer life
Early Western Travels, 1748-1846
A series of annotated reprints of some of the best and rarest contemporary volumes of travel: descriptive of the Indians and social and economic conditions in the middle and far West, during the period of early American settlement, Edited with notes, introduction, index, etc. The 32 volumes of reprints include 2 volumes of indexes. Some of the reprints are offered separately on this website, and…
Shares: Overland journeys to the Pacific, Indians of North America, Description and travel, Travel
Fifteenth census of the United States
Shares: Mines and mineral resources, Indians of North America, Business
Tent-life in Siberia and adventures among the Koraks and other tribes in Kamchatka and northern Asia
An account of a period living in Siberia in pursuit of a plan to carry a telegraph line across land to Europe through Siberia in consequence of the failure of efforts to carry a telegraph line to Europe under the Atlantic.
Shares: Description and travel, Travel