First to the Parklands Original Narrative from the History of Western Exploration

The frontier of the American West has been preserved, in small part, in our national parks. This book is a collection of 19th century journals, diaries, articles, memoirs, reports (and contemporary illustrations and maps) of those American who were among the first to explore the wonders that became our parklands. The descriptions are vivid. John Wesley Powell, in 1869, writes of his start down the grand canyon. He was about to take four little wooden boats down a river which "the old mountaineers had told us could not be run." There are 50 first-person accounts in all, from the likes of Meriwether Lewis, Zebulon Pike, Washington Irving, Osborne Russell, John C. Fremont, George Ruxton, and many others. Each account has an historical introduction that sets the time and place. These explorers describe the wonders that became the parks at the Black Hills, the Grand Tetons, Flaming Gorge, Yellowstone, Chimney Rock, Yosemite, Scotts Bluff, the Wind River Range, the Guadalupe Mountains, the Redwoods, Big Bend, Glacier, Petrified Forest, Organ Pipe, Mount Rainier, the Grand Canyon, Canyon-lands, the Cascades, Kings Canyon, Shoshone Falls, Bryce, Zion, Jackson's Hole, and many others. The American frontier was not just the geographical places, of course. It was the experience of the first explorers and settlers, their awe, their fear, their sense of opportunity, and that is what is captured here. These narratives are as much a part of our frontier heritage as the parks themselves. Book jacket.Eling, Jeffrey is the author of 'First to the Parklands Original Narrative from the History of Western Exploration', published 2003 under ISBN 9781589762473 and ISBN 1589762479.