This book breaks new ground, not only in its coverage of California, but also in its treatment of the role of cultural links in enhancing national loyalty, in its attention to many groups of people of color, including Chinese and Latinos, and what happened to them during the Civil War. In addition, the book devotes attention to the ebb and flow of the two political parties and to the little-known fact that nearly 17,000 California men and women volunteered for military service on behalf of the Union. Glenna Matthews broadens understanding of the Civil War era both in terms of geography and in terms of social groupings.

The Golden State in the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California

The Western Hero in History and Legend

LANSFORD WARREN HASTINGS, California's energetic herald of expansion, played a prominent role in several events of the 1840s which aided the Americanization of the Pacific slope. In 1842 he led the first planned overland wagon migration to Oregon, and that winter he surveyed the townsite of Oregon City and acted as John McLoughlin's land claims lawyer at the falls of the Willamette. In 1845 he published one of the early guidebooks on Oregon and California. In the latter state he helped lay out the town of Sutterville, part of present Sacramento, devised a plan for Mormon colonization near Montezuma in northern California, and led the first emigrants over the Salt Desert Cutoff that subsequently bore his name. After serving in the California Battalion in 1846 as captain of Company F, he attempted to raise a company of volunteers for service in Mazatlan, Mexico. In the fall of 1849 he served as a delegate to the state constitutional convention in Monterey. Following his marriage in 1848 to Charlotte Catherine Toler, Hastings settled down in northern California to practice law. Late in the next decade he moved with his family to Arizona City, present-day Yuma, for reasons of health. While there he became attracted to southern seccessionist thought and, after the outbreak of the Civil War, devised an elaborate but otherwise unfeasible plan to capture southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico for the Confederacy. The defeat of the South sent him off touring northern Brazil. He returned in 1867 to Mobile to publish a guidebook to the Amazon region, where, near

The Ambitions of Lansford W. Hastings: A Study in Western Myth-Making

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/civil_war_history/v018/18.2.stoflet.pdf

A Bibliography of Civil War Articles: 1971

THE SUMMER OF 1840, a young Boston lawyer and Harvard College graduate named Richard Henry Dana Jr. set out upon the road to literary fame with the publication of his book Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea. In the literary circles of both New and Old England the book was an instant and enormous success. With one magnificent stroke of his pen the twenty-five-year-old scion of one of Boston's finest families had earned the literary accolades that have eluded many a capable writer, including his own father.

Historical Mythmaking: Richard Henry Dana and American Emigration to California, 1840-1850

FOR A MAN WHO HAD the good fortune to be involved in the vanguard of much of western activity during the 1840's, Lansford Warren Hastings remains a shadowy and elusive figure.1 Most written accounts of his impact upon the development of the Far West have been either fragmentary in scope or superficial in explanation. In part, at least, this is due to the absence of adequate documentation concerning his many exploits. Hastings left no diary or volumes of papers for this period whereby his activities could be more carefully charted and his motives more clearly discerned.2 Where little is known about the man, much has been suspected. These suspicions, moreover, have been used to close the gaps in the historical record until it is extremely difficult to separate fact from fiction in what has become a growing Hastings myth. Faced with such scattered and conflicting evidence, one is tempted to cry out with John Donne, " 'Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone." Nowhere is this problem more observable than in the past genera-

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/3637106

Thomas F. Andrews

Papers

The Ambitions of Lansford W. Hastings: A Study in Western Myth-Making

The Controversial Hastings Overland Guide: A Reassessment