Emory's great two-volume _Report on United States and Mexican Boundary Survey_, Washington 1857 and 1859, is, aside from descriptions of borderlands and their inhabitants, a veritable encyclopedia, wonderfully illustrated, on western flora and fauna. United States Commissioner on this Boundary Survey (following the Mexican War) was John Russell Bartlett. While exploring from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific and far down into Mexico, he wrote _Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora and Chihuahua_. published in two volumes, New York, 1854. For me very little rewritten history has the freshness and fascination of these strong, firsthand personal narratives, though I recognize many of them as being the stuff of literature rather than literature itself. FOWLER, JACOB. _The Journal of Jacob Fowler, 1821-1822_, edited by Elliott Coues, New York, 1898. Hardly another chronicle of the West is so Defoe-like in homemade realism, whether on Indians and Indian horses or Negro Paul's experience with the Mexican "Lady" at San Fernando de Taos. Should be reprinted. GAMBRELL, HERBERT. _Anson Jones: The Last President of Texas_, Garden City, New York, 1948; now distributed by Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, Texas. Anson Jones was more surged over than surgent. Infused with a larger comprehension than that behind many a world figure, this biography of a provincial figure is perhaps the most artfully written that Texas has produced. It goes into the soul of the man. HOBBS, JAMES. _Wild Life in the Far West_, Hartford, 1872. Hobbs saw just about all the elephants and heard just about all the owls to be seen and heard in the Far West including western Mexico. Should be reprinted. HULBERT, ARCHER BUTLER. _Forty-Niners: The Chronicle of the California Trail_, Little, Brown, Boston, 1931. Hulbert read exhaustively in the exhausting literature by and about the gold hunters rushing to California. Then he wove into a synthetic diary the most interesting and illuminating records on happenings, characters, ambitions, talk, singing, the whole life of the emigrants. IRVING, WASHINGTON. Irving made his ride into what is now Oklahoma in 1832. He had recently returned from a seventeen-year stay in Europe and was a mature literary man--as mature as a conforming romanticist could become Prairie life refreshed him. A _Tour on the Prairies_, published in 1835, remains refreshing. It is illuminated by _Washington Irving on the Prairie; or, A Narrative of the Southwest in the Year 1832_, by Henry Leavitt Ellsworth (who accompanied Irving), edited by Stanley T. Williams and Barbara D. Simison, New York, 1937; by _The Western Journals of Washington Irving_, excellently edited by John Francis McDermott, Norman, Oklahoma, 1944; and by Charles J. Latrobe's _The Rambler in North America, 1832-1833_, New York, 1835. JAMES, MARQUIS. _The Raven_, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1929. Graphic life of Sam Houston.