No comments about Daniel Boone and the hunters of Kentucky.

No comments about Am I Dreaming.

No comments about Pioneer days in Arizona: From the Spanish Occupation to Statehood.

1 comments about Salt Desert trails;: A history of the Hastings Cutoff and other early trails which crossed the Great Salt Desert seeking a shorter road to California.

1. During the period from the mid 1840s to 1869, emigration across the Great Plains from the Missouri to Oregon and California was undertaken by thousands of emigrants from all walks of life and for all kinds of reasons. The suffering they endured was indescribable.
   
   In the early days, there was no fixed route and the emigrants were in the hands of guides who promised, for a fee of $10 per waggon, to guide them along the way. Many routes were used. Some were well-worn, others perfunctorily surveyed, and yet others were based on mere guesswork.
   
   In 1845, one of the guides, by the name of Lansford Hastings, wrote a guide book entitled "The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California". This sold like wildfire back east, and inspired a wave of discontented Americans to sell up and head west, following the route he described in his book.
   
   Calling Hastings a guide is however a misnomer. He'd travelled across the USA in an emigrant train in 1842, but to Oregon, not California. And while the route to California which he was selling was probably the shortest in distance, it took the emigrants across some of the roughest country they could possibly encounter, and then right across the barren Great Salt Desert. The emigrants who followed what became known as the Hastings Cut-off suffered disaster after disaster, and the trek across the desert ended up to be the ruin of many.
   
   In his book, Kelly recounts the stories of some of the parties who crossed the Salt Desert, including that of the legendary Donner party, and the dreadful disasters that befell them. He includes a lengthy account of a drive across the desert that he undertook in 1929 following the still-visible trail of the emigrants. There are fascinating photographs that he took, and absorbing interviews with some of the ancient pioneers who had occupied the fertile parts of the land when the emigrant trail was still fresh and littered with the abandoned belongings of those who had come to grief.
   
   It's clear from the book that he has a fascination with the fate of the Donner Party, and devotes a great deal of his time to their journey. Much of the account of his own journey across the desert is concerned with looking for artefacts connected with their plight as they abandon their belongings in the desperate struggle towards water. His delight is overwhelming when he finally identifies the remains of the Reed family's "Pioneer Palace Car", abandoned in the desert when the oxen escape.
   
   But herein lies the rub. There is a great deal of contemporary evidence for the abandonment of the Reed's family waggon, but when the Reed diary was eventually published in 1947, it clearly states that Reed borrowed a team of oxen from another group of pioneers and went back a few days later to recover the wagon. In any case, there's no contemporary evidence to suggest that the Pioneer Palace Car was anything like as large as more modern sources suggest and as large as the remains that Kelly found.
   
   Now of course it's all very well saying that a 1929 book won't normally contain any evidence that wasn't published until 1947. However, in the 1969 revision, Kelly quotes extensively from Reed's diary, including the passage where Reed returns to rescue his waggon, yet makes absolutely no revision to any of his conclusions.
   
   Kelly is an excellent historian who has written a considerable number of books on pioneer life in the Utah area. He has made a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the conditions of that era and before his death, donated all his notes and photographs to the Utah State Historical Society. His crucial importance should not be overlooked. Yet it's his rather cavalier approach that casts a great deal of suspicion over the thoroughness of his work. It's as if he has already drawn his conclusions and is looking for facts to back them up rather than examining the facts first and then drawing the conclusions.
   
   Factually, it's doubtful if there's much on this subject that is better-written than Kelly's account of life on the Great Salt Desert. On that score alone, there's every reason to buy this book. Just be very wary about jumping to the same conclusions that Kelly does, without having read any other material on the subject.

No comments about Scott's Last Expedition.

No comments about Overtime: The Bonus Years.

No comments about Around the World - On Expenses.

No comments about Pioneers.

No comments about Amelia Earhart Returns from Saipan.

No comments about La Hija Del Desierto/ The Daughter Of Desert.