[WESTERN AMERICANA]. The Journal of Jacob Fowler: Narrating an Adventure from Arkansas through the Indian Territory, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico, to the Sources of Rio Grande del Norte, 1821-22. Edited and with notes by Elliott Coues

New York: Francis P. Harper, 1898. First Edition. Very good. 8vo. xxiv, 183 [1] pp., folding facsimile of a page of Jacob Fowler's original manuscript as frontispiece. Original royal blue publisher's cloth (lacking rare dust-jacket), otherwise a fine copy, most gatherings unopened. FIRST EDITION, LIMITED TO 950 NUMBERED COPIES, OF THIS "IMPORTANT AND EARLY JOURNAL" OF THE FIRST AMERICAN TO TRAVEL OVER MUCH OF THE ROUTE. THIS PARTICULAR COPY IS PRESERVED IN FINE CONDITION AND IS LARGELY UNOPENED.

"Includes eyewitness information on encounters with Comanches and Kiowas in Western Oklahoma and surrounding areas during the 1820s." (Tate, Indians of Texas 2217).

"Fowler was 57 years old and had already survived a long career, dating back to 1782, as a scout, hunter, frontier trader, and surveyor, when, in 1821, he embarked on this trading and trapping expedition to the headwaters of the Arkansas River. His journal of that trip, published here for the first time, describes a trek from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to the present site of Pueblo, Colorado, a season of trapping in and around New Mexico, and a return to St. Louis in 1822. Fowler and his party were the first Americans, after Zebulon Pike, to see much of the country they crossed." (Dorothy Sloan Auction 9, quoting Pingenot).

"Hardly another chronicle of the West is so Defoe-like in homemade realism, whether on Indians and Indian horses or Negro Paul's experience with the Mexican 'Lady' at San Fernando de Taos." (Dobie, p. 86).

FURTHER REFERENCES: Wynar 2036. Eberstadt, Modern Narratives of the Plains and the Rockies 168. Campbell, p. 137. Howes F298. Rittenhouse 224. Saunders 2843.

PROVENANCE: From the Dorothy Sloan Collection of Western Americana.