Death Valley in '49. Important Chapter of California Pioneer History

San Jose, Cal: The Pacific Tree and Vine Co, 1894. First edition. Near Fine. A Near Fine copy. 498 pp., complete with four plates (including frontispiece). Publisher's mustard yellow cloth. A bit of fading to spine and darkening to edge of upper board. Some toning to endpapers at gutter. Shallow nick to edge of front endpaper and to edge of preliminary blank. An excellent, clean and fresh copy.

William Lewis Manly's Death Valley in '49 is a "classic account, by a survivor, of dire sufferings endured by an emigrant party on a short-cut from Salt Lake to California through the Valley called ever after by this fearful name" (Howes M-255). Manly was a guide for the Death Valley '49ers, a group of Gold Rush pioneers attempting to make the overland trip from Utah to California. Ater the party got lost in the area that would later become known as Death Valley, Manly and John Haney Rogers embarked on a perilous three-hundred-mile journey on foot to secure relief and supplies for their party, who waited in Death Valley for their return for twenty-six days. Manly and Rogers eventually rescued the party and led them to safety in California. The book is now considered a crucial entry in the bibliography of California history and a landmark work on the Death Valley region: "No other book that has ever been written about Death Valley can even remotely approach the Manly in historic importance. It is unlikely that one ever will" (Graff 2670). Near Fine.