Plotting the Golden West : American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail (Paperback)

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. The West and the man of letters: confidence and anxiety; 2. Fremont and the humble bee; 3. The forty-niners: the stylistic pathology of the Overland Trail; 4. The unofficial Gold Rush; 5. The journalists' California; 6. Mark Twain's West: the stillbirth of satire; 7. The perennial critique and the poem of fact; Notes to the text; List of primary sources treated at length; An essay on further reading; Index.