Mary McDougall Gordon, ed. Overland to California with the Pioneer Line: The Gold Rush Diary of Bernard J. Reid (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987) How do historians work?

Reading a Gold Rush diary this morning, I stumbled across this brief (but unusually full) description by the author, a young Irish-American named Bernard Reid, of a campsite in present-day Wyoming in July, 1849: “Growing city of wagons, tents, men, women and children, whites, Indians, negros, horses, oxen, and...