Across the Continent: A Summer's Journey to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States, With Speaker Colfax
By , Editor of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican. Springfield, Mass. : Samuel Bowles & Co.
SINCE Mr. Greeley set the example, it has been the manifest destiny of every enterprising journalist to take an occasional trip across the continent, and personally inspect his subscribers. The latest overland Odyssey of tills kind — transacted by three silent editors and one very public Speaker— is recorded in Mr. Bowles's new book; which proceeds; as one may observe, from his own publishing office and bindery, and may therefore almost claim, like the quaint little books presented by the eccentric Quincy Tufts to Harvard College Library, to have been “written, printed, and bound by the same hand.”
Journalism is a good training, in some ways, for a trip like this. It implies a quick eye for facts, a good memory for figures, a hearty faith in the national bird, and a boundless appetite for new acquaintances. Every Eastern editor, moreover, is sure to find old neighbors throughout the West ; and he who escorts a rising politician has all the world for a friend.
The result is, in this case, a thoroughly American book, — American in the sense of to-day, if not according to the point of view of the millennium. It is American in its vast applications of arithmetic ; in the facility with which it brings the breadth of a continent within the limits of a summer’s ride ; in the eloquence which rises to sublimity over mining stock, and dwindles to the verge of commonplace before unmarketable natural beauties. Of course, it is the best book on the theme it handles, for it is the latest; it is lively, readable, instructive ; but no descriptions of those changing regions can last much longer than an almanac, and this will retain its place only until the coming of the next editorial pilgrim.