Prairie and Mountain Sketches

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957 First edition. Collected by Clyde and Mae Reed Porter. Edited by Kate L. Gregg & John Francis McDermott. liv, 239pp. Illustrated with sketches by the author and from watercolors by Alfred Jacob Miller; notes and index. Brown cloth decorated in dark green. A very fine copy with pictorial dust jacket (minor tear to upper edge of jacket). Field's firsthand account of a journey into the Rocky Mountains in 1843 under the leadership of Sir William Drummond Stewart. This was the first "party of pleasure to the Rocky Mountains" - an excursion of twenty gentlemen and thirty hunters, muleteers, and camp servants, with no other purpose than the fun of riding out hundreds of miles to the Wind River Mountains and the excitement of buffalo hunting. Field, a writer and assistant editor of the New Orleans Picayune, was invited to join the party. Here published in full for the first time and taken primarily from Fields' letters and diaries is his on-the-spot account of the party's adventures in the early West, supplemented by articles for the Picayune. Field tells what the West was really like at the time. This work is enhanced with reproductions of period watercolors of Alfred Jacob Miller. [Mintz: 151]..