A Pictorial View of California; Including a Description of the Panama and Nicaragua Routes, With Information and Advice Interesting to All, Particularly Those Who Intend to Visit the Golden Region. By a Returned Californian

New York: Published by Henry Bill Sold Only by Subscription, 1853. Second edition. Forty-eight plates. 224,[1] pp. 8vo. Original gilt cloth. Extremities lightly worn and repaired. Bookplate on front flyleaf. Light soiling and foxing. A good, sound copy. Second edition. Forty-eight plates. 224,[1] pp. 8vo. The second edition of Letts' CALIFORNIA ILLUSTRATED..., a vivid narrative of California mining life, published at the height of the gold fever.  "Letts produced one of the best accounts of gambling, violence, and life in the mines" - Kurutz.  Particularly valuable for the attractive, accurate illustrations drawn by Cooper and lithographed by Cameron.  The book illustrates scenes across the Isthmus of Panama, in Sacramento and the gold fields, in Santa Barbara, and across Mexico and Panama.  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."  Cameron, the brilliant hunchback lithographer who was addicted to drink, deserves much of the credit for the Currier & Ives prints. Hill 1016; Cowan p.390; Howes L300, "aa" ; Sabin 40723; Peters, America on Stone, pp.130-31, 147; Peters, California on Stone, pp.97, 103-5; Wheat Gold Rush 125 (ref); Kurutz 398e