June Book Tuesday

For this month's Book Tuesday we have a very interesting set of books.
While covering the American Prairies more than the Canadian ones they are a fascinating look at life on the Great Plains during the early part of our period, before the vast grasslands were divvied up by, rails, roads, barb wire and the plow.
Both volumes are available at the Internet Archive link.

Enjoy

The Victorian Society of Alberta

Commerce Of The Prairies
By Josiah Gregg
1849

Written as a scrupulously accurate guidebook to the prairies and as an authoritative account of the early Santa Fe trade, Commerce of the Prairies has been a favorite of historians, ethnologists, naturalists, and collectors of Western Americana for generations. But Gregg’s masterpiece is not for specialists alone: its vivid descriptions of desert mirages, wagon caravans, Indian alarms and attacks, buffalo hunts, and other early Western phenomena will delight all who wish to know the country as it was before the great herds of buffalo were slaughtered and the roving Indians confined to reservations, before the landscape was transformed by barbed wire, domestic cattle, plowed fields, and modern highways.

Josiah Gregg, a man of rare sensitivity and passionate science interest, joined a caravan of traders bound for Santa Fé in 1831 and almost immediately developed a fascination for the adventure-packed life of Santa Fé trader. And during the ten years that he engaged in the San Fé trade, Gregg took copious notes on the life and landscape of the American prairies and the Mexican plateau, later utilizing them in Commerce of the Prairies.