From Texas to San Diego in 1851

In 1851 the expedition of Captain Lorenzo Sitgreaves set out to explore and map the southern portion of the Four Corners region of the Southwest an area won in the recent war with Mexico. Included in the expedition was Dr. Samuel W. Woodhouse, a thirty-year-old physician and naturalist. Although Sitgreaves s official report is only eighteen pages long, Woodhouse kept four detailed pocket diaries of the expedition s explorations from San Antonio to San Diego, including notes on the...
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In 1851 the expedition of Captain Lorenzo Sitgreaves set out to explore and map the southern portion of the Four Corners region of the Southwest an area won in the recent war with Mexico. Included in the expedition was Dr. Samuel W. Woodhouse, a thirty-year-old physician and naturalist. Although Sitgreaves s official report is only eighteen pages long, Woodhouse kept four detailed pocket diaries of the expedition s explorations from San Antonio to San Diego, including notes on the topography, plants, and animals they encountered. His diaries also provide the first detailed descriptions of the native peoples of the area. Much of Woodhouse's account concerns exploration from the Indian Pueblo of Zuni westward along the thirty-fifth parallel to the Colorado River, then downriver to Yuma Crossing and across the desert to San Diego. But there is more: Woodhouse also made entries nearly every day from boarding a ship in New York for Texas until he left Zuni. He recorded three weeks in San Antonio, made daily entries across the Trans-Pecos, and described much of a month in New Mexico. This is the first time Woodhouse s private journal has been published. While the bare facts of the Sitgreaves expedition have long been known, Woodhouse s diaries add depth and detail and are a treasure trove for historians, ethnohistorians, and naturalists as well as anyone with an interest in the history of the Southwest. Twenty-five scenic plates show terrain and native peoples in a land never before pictured and are some of the earliest examples of chromolithography done in the United States."