Breaking the Wilderness
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Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- University students and researchers studying the history of American westward expansion and frontier history
- General readers who enjoy nineteenth-century exploration narratives and travel literature
- English or history majors who need original English historical sources for course reading
- Travel enthusiasts interested in American geography and the trans-Mississippi region
Not a good fit for
- Readers seeking modern annotations, maps, and scholarly introductions
- Beginning readers unaccustomed to nineteenth-century English narrative style
- Exam candidates expecting a systematic general history or textbook-style framework
Reading tips
- First review a timeline of American westward expansion, then read the chapters in order to situate events in context
- Keep a map at hand while reading to match place names and routes, compensating for the absence of maps in the original
- When encountering passages on Native Americans and land development, take notes and read critically against modern scholarship
- Read alongside other memoirs by Western eyewitnesses to compare how different authors observed the same region
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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About the author
Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh (1853–1935) was an American writer on western exploration and the Colorado River, active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Public information about him is limited, and details of his life and education are difficult to verify, yet his surviving works make his interests clear: he wrote repeatedly about the canyon country of the American Southwest, especially the navigation and exploration of the Colorado River and its tributaries. A Canyon Voyage records the experiences of canyon travel, The Romance of the Colorado River surveys the river's exploration history and geography, and Breaking the Wilderness turns to the opening of the wilderness. Grounded in firsthand observation, his writing is solid and rich in geographical detail, combining the immediacy of travel literature with the order of historical narrative; it remains a valuable reference for understanding the Colorado River exploration tradition and preserves early texts on the American West's rivers and environment.
