Across the Continent: A Journey to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States

Samuel Bowles traveled across the United States during the mid-1800s, and offered up his experiences in Across the Continent. He had a keen eye for the landscape and its people, particularly the Mormon developments in the West, which he had a unique chance to observe: We have been taken on an excursion to the Great Salt Lake, bathed in its wonderful waters, on which you float like a cork, sailed on its surface, and picnicked by its shore, -if picnic can be without women for sentiment and to spread table-cloth, and to be helped up and over rocks. Can you New Englanders fancy a stag picnic? We have been turned loose in the big strawberry patch of one of the saints-very worldly strawberries and more worldly appetites met and mingled; and we have had a peep into a moderate Mormon harem, but being introduced to two different women of the same name, one after another, was more than I could stand without blushing. Samuel Bowles III (1826-1878) is perhaps most remembered for being the outspoken publisher and editor of the Springfield Republican, which at the time boasted of the largest circulation in New England, outside of Boston. He traveled across the United States and Europe repeatedly, and accounts suggest he was advised by doctors to do so often on account of his poor health, marred by years of overwork. However, that may have been just something of an excuse, because was his accounts hint, the challenges of his journeys seem the opposite of a rest cure and no easy feat. This new edition is dedicated to Arturo de Hoyos, who knows Mormon history.