The Old Republic in the West

Abstract

Daniel Feller. The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. 264 + xvi pp. Dan L. Flores, ed. Jefferson and Southwestern Exploration: The Freeman and Custis Accounts of the Red River Expedition of 1806. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984.386 + xx pp. Thelma S. Guild and Harvey L. Carter. Kit Carson: A Pattern for Heroes. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.367 + xii pp. Polly Welts Kaufman, ed. Women Teachers on the Frontier. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984.270 + xxiii pp. James P. Ronda. Lewis and Clark among the Indians. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. 310 + xv pp. Two decades ago William H. Goetzmann, in Exploration and Empire, provided us with an examination of the reconnaissance of the American Far West. Early in that many-faced monograph, he briefly traced the rovings of Peter Skene Ogden through the distant mountain and basin regions of the United States. Ogden had been sent by the Hudson's Bay Company to create a "fur desert" that would seal out American traders. He failed to do that but, finding the Humboldt River and probing southward to the Gulf of California, he accomplished feats of trail blazing. Ogden had carried the frontier of British North America down to the region of the Gila River.