California Illustrated: including a Description of the Panama and Nicaragua Routes. By a Returned Californian by [LETTS, John M.] - 1852

New York: William Holdredge, 1852. 8vo. (8 7/8 x 5 5/8 inches). 224pp. 48 tinted lithographic plates by G. W. Lewis after George V. Cooper. Scattered minor foxing. Publisher's pictorial cloth gilt A vivid narrative of California mining life, issued at the height of the Gold Rush fever: the rare first edition, first issue, with the Holdredge imprint. Letts sailed to Chagres in 1849, went overland to the Pacific, and sailed to San Francisco. This work is a vivid narrative of California mining life, issued at the height of the gold fever. It is particularly valuable for the attractive, accurate illustrations drawn by Cooper and lithographed by Cameron. Peters remarks: "Cooper has left us a pungent, graphic record of the long trip to and from the gold fields, of the young cities he found mushrooming there, of booming San Francisco and Sacramento, of the lovely vestiges of the mission-founding padres in early California, and of the actual life of the forty-niners, with its flavor of roughing it, humor, hope, and all the luring magic of the yellow streak." A lovely copy in its original publisher's gilt binding. Howes l300, "aa"; Cowan, p.390; Graff 2469; Flake 4880; Kurutz 395a; Hill, p.476; Peters, America on Stone, pp.130-31, 147; Peters, California on Stone, pp. 97,103-5; Sabin 40723; Wheat Gold Rush 125.