McClure, A. K. Three Thousand Miles through the Rocky Mountains. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1869. First Edition. [11558]
Original dark maroon publisher's cloth, very slight edge-wear, surface flecking to a portion of the back cover that may have gotten damp at one time (see pics), joints good, 7 3/4 x 5 inches. Vignette wood-engraved portraits as frontispiece: Col. W. F. Sanders, Judge L. B. Williston, Col. J. X. Beidler, Col. Geo. L. Shoup, and Col. Neil Howie. Additional plates of Main Street, Salt Lake City; and of Brigham Young. 456 clean pages. Good. Hardcover.
Howes M49. Graff 2576; Flake 5122: "Includes a trip through Utah with copious observations on Mormonism and the church system, p. 149-74, 184-88."
The book is comprised of 48 letters "written hastily, during a journey of three thousand miles through the Rocky Mountains, and often in the midst of annoyances not favorable to epistolary perfection...I need hardly say that they were not written with the design to collect them in book form..." - Preface.
McClure sent letters both to the New York Tribune and to the Franklin Repository.
Alexander Kelly McClure (1828-1909), b. Sherman's Valley, PA; d. Wallingford, PA. McClure rose from poverty to become a successful newspaper editor and writer, as well as a lawyer and politician of the Whig, and later the Republican, parties. He served in the Pennsylvania House and Senate, and was an ardent supporter and correspondent of Abraham Lincoln. In 1862 President Lincoln commissioned him a major in the Union Army with the task of raising seventeen Pennsylvania regiments. He was captured at his home in Chambersburg by General J. E. B. Stuart's troops and released when Stuart reached the town. His home & newspaper office were burned during the third occupation of Chambersburg by the Confederates. He traveled extensively in the West after the war with interest in the Philadelphia-based Montana Gold and Silver Mining Company, seeking to replace the wealth lost by the depredations of his property during that conflict. He became superintendent of one of the company's mills in the Montana Territory. After supporting U. S. Grant in his bid for the presidency, McClure returned to the newspaper business and to his law practice in Philadelphia.
"In 1867, McClure wrote a book called Three Thousand Miles through the Rocky Mountains while traveling out West to regain his health and to clear his mind. The book eventually became a popular source about the West. Describing the frontier and gold rush and the lawmen of the West, McClure wrote that, 'While there is a thief, a murderer, a defaulter of a savage to disturb the peace of Montana, he [the lawman] will remain the most efficient messenger of justice in the mountain gold regions.' It was during this time of travel that McClure gained an interest in mining and decided to invest some of his money into western mining." - Damon M. Laabs, Pennsylvania Center for the Book, online.
