Across America; Or, The Great West and the Pacific Coast

In the summer of 1866, a young American officer named James Fowler Rusling received orders to inspect military posts from the Missouri River to the Pacific Coast. What began as a routine assignment became something else entirely: a firsthand chronicle of a nation in transformation, a vivid passage through landscapes that no longer exist in the form he describes. Rusling travels by train, stagecoach, and horseback, moving through territories that the Civil War has only begun to reshape. He records encounters with Indigenous peoples, frontier settlers, soldiers, and transient populations drawn westward by gold, land, and the promise of a new life. His prose captures the raw texture of a moment in American history when the old West was already vanishing before it was fully documented. This is primary source history at its most immediate: unsanitized, curious, and alive with the sensory details of a continent in flux.