Dur­ing the fall term of 2011, Pro­fes­sor Martha Sandweiss, His­tory Depart­ment, and Brian Just, Art Museum Cura­tor of the Art of the Ancient Amer­i­cas, co-taught a course enti­tled “Arti­facts, Images, and His­tory: The Amer­i­can South­west.” The course explored Native arts of the Amer­i­can South­west by ana­lyz­ing Princeton’s own col­lec­tions in the hold­ings of the Art Museum, the Depart­ment of Geo­sciences, and the Depart­ment of Rare Books and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions. The Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Art Museum mag­a­zine high­lighted the course in its Win­ter 2012 issue, also avail­able on the museum’s news page: The Museum in the Class­room.

Pro­fes­sor Sandwiess’s spring course, “His­tory of the Amer­i­can West,” will make use of the department’s strong hold­ings of gold rush and over­land jour­ney mate­r­ial.  Six­teen man­u­script over­land nar­ra­tive collections con­sist­ing of let­ters, jour­nals, diaries, and scrap­books were recently dig­i­tized and placed in the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Dig­i­tal Library, allow­ing stu­dents (and schol­ars world­wide) online access to pri­mary doc­u­ments from the period.

While many of the col­lec­tions are recent addi­tions to the depart­ment, such as the Daniel Gano Gold Rush Scrap­book (C1398) and the David Starr Hoyt Man­u­scripts (C1407) that were acquired by the Man­u­scripts Divi­sion in 2011, over­land nar­ra­tives were a par­tic­u­lar inter­est to Philip Ash­ton Rollins, Class of 1889. While Rollins focused more on printed works, man­u­scripts were often selected as well, such as a forty-miner’s jour­nal writ­ten by M. A. Vio­lette, “Man­u­script Jour­nal of Over­land Jour­ney to Sleepy Hol­low,” 1849 (C0199, no. 1092).

Thorn­ton, Ore­gon and Cal­i­for­nia in 1848 … (Harper & Broth­ers, 1849). Philip Ash­ton Rollins Collection

Rollins early col­lect­ing of printed works was guided by Henry R. Wagner’s  bib­li­og­ra­phy of over­land jour­neys, The Plains and the Rock­ies: A Bib­li­og­ra­phy of Orig­i­nal Nar­ra­tives of Travel and Adven­ture, 1808–1865 (first pub­lished in the 1920s and revised and expanded many times since).  Rollins’ col­lec­tion of over­land nar­ra­tives nat­u­rally cap­tured the Cal­i­for­nia Gold Rush era (1848–53) and marks the begin­ning of the depart­ment’s gold rush col­lec­tions. Many of the printed works col­lected by Rollins can be found online via Google Books or the Hathi Trust Dig­i­tal Library, such as J. Quinn Thornton’s Ore­gon and Cal­i­for­nia in 1848: With an Appen­dix, Includ­ing Recent and Authen­tic Infor­ma­tion on the Sub­ject of the Gold Mines of Cal­i­for­nia, and Other Valu­able Mat­ter of Inter­est to the Emi­grant, Etc. (New York: Harper & Broth­ers, 1849). Rollins, how­ever, soon ven­tured well beyond Wagner’s cut-off point, the close of the Civil War in 1865, which allowed him to con­tinue col­lect­ing over­land nar­ra­tives through­out the rail­road years.