wourth's fancy, it still remains a valuable record of the time. Another book in this class is The Adventures of James Capen Adams of California, edited by Theodore H. Hittell (1860 and 1911); and still another is William F. Drannan's Thirty-One Years on the Plains and Mountains, or The Last Voice from the Plains (1900), wherein he describes his intimacy with Kit Carson and other frontiersmen, all apparently from memory, as was the case with the life records of most of the rougher class of hunters. Drannan published another book, Captain W. F. Drannan, Chief of Scouts, etc. Joe Meek was a brilliant example of the early trapper and had a varied experience which Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor records in her fine work The River of the West (1870).
An extremely scarce volume is Reid's Tramp: or a Journal of the Incidents of Ten Months Travel Through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, etc. This volume by John C. Reid was published in 1858 at Selma, Alabama. The United States, after the Mexican War, had bought from Mexico a strip south of the Gila River known as the "Gadsden Purchase," and to this many pioneers flocked expecting a new Eden, Eldorado, Elysian Fields, or what not. Reid remarks: "We may review the history of the fall, death, and interment of these hopes in a faroff country of irremediable disappointment." We know of the existence of but four copies of Reid's book.
After the Gadsden Purchase the matter of the Mexican boundary was ready for determination. The work was under the direction of Major W. H. Emory, who made an excellent Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey (1857) in two fine volumes, the first two chapters of volume I containing a very interesting personal account. One of the boundary commissioners, John Russell Bartlett, published his own account in two volumes of Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua During the Years 1850, 57, 52, and 1853 (1854), a valuable addition to the literature of the South-west.
On the north the boundary was also surveyed, and Archibald Campbell and W. J. Twining wrote Reports upon the Survey of the Boundary between the Territory of the United States and the Possessions of Great Britain from the Lake of the Woods to the Summit of the Rocky Mountains (1878). Previously the
