Produced by Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) ACROSS THE PLAINS TO CALIFORNIA IN 1852 JOURNAL OF MRS. LODISA FRIZZELL EDITED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT IN THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BY VICTOR HUGO PALTSITS KEEPER OF MANUSCRIPTS [Illustration: Logo] THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY 1915 REPRINTED MAY 1915 FROM THE BULLETIN OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY OF APRIL 1915 [Illustration: _Indians._ FROM A WATER-COLOR BY MRS. FRIZZELL, AUTHOR OF THE ACCOMPANYING NARRATIVE] * * * * * ACROSS THE PLAINS TO CALIFORNIA IN 1852 FROM THE LITTLE WABASH RIVER IN ILLINOIS TO THE PACIFIC SPRINGS OF WYOMING JOURNAL OF MRS. LODISA FRIZZELL EDITED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT IN THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BY VICTOR HUGO PALTSITS, KEEPER OF MANUSCRIPTS EDITOR'S NOTE This simple narrative journal was written at Canyon Creek in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, in the middle of December, 1852, by Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell, who, with her husband, Lloyd Frizzell, and their four sons, set out on April 14th, of that year, from their unnamed home, not far from Ewington, Effingham County, Illinois, on the upper reaches of the Little Wabash River, on an overland journey to California. The journal records her observations and experiences from the Little Wabash, across Illinois and Missouri, to St. Louis and St. Joseph, and over the St. Joseph and Oregon Trails to the Pacific Springs, in Fremont County, Wyoming. Here, at the continental divide and at the halfway point of her journey, the journal ends, on June 26th, or the seventy-fourth day out. It was nearly seven months later, in her snowbound quarters of the Sierra Nevadas, that she busied herself with its composition from notes she had kept by the way, enlivened by her memory.