FROM COWHIDES
TO GOLDEN FLEECE
A Narrative of California, 1832 - 1858
Based upon Unpublished Correspondence of THOMAS OLIVER LARKIN, Trader, Developer, Promoter, and only American Counsul
By Reuben L. Underhill
Stanford University Press, Stanford University, CA, 1939, Presumed 1st Edition
Hardcover book, near very good condition, minor shelf/reading wear, some foxing/spotting to frontispiece, lacking dust jacket
While the writer was making a study of Mexican land grants in California, chance led him to the Larkin letters in the Bancroft Library of the University of California. There among thousands of little-known, uncatalogued, hand-penned pages lay definitive chronicles of more than eighty, ninety, and one hundred years ago. Here was recorded the pulse-beat of the political and business life of that day, a narration of events and episodes reported in intimate terms as they occurred, not musty nor illegible but lucid and sparkling - as though the ink were hardly dry.
Thomas Oliver Larkin left among his carefully arranged effects a volume known as "Correspondence of U.S. Consul at Monterey, 1844-1849." This embraces copies of the consul's outgoing letters only, and these letters have been extensively read and quoted, having been accepted by almost all contemporary students and writers as the only file of his correspondence. Meanwhile none volumes comprising the letters received by him - personal, official, and business - have lain largely unknown and unseen. This latter comprehensive collection forms the basis of this work. It carries through the period from the middle 1830's to 1857.
The work here presented is designed to express through the person of Thomas Oliver Larkin and his letters the beginning of California's business era when the caballero counted his hides and the trader his profits and he subsequent transformation of Lotus Land into Yanqui Land. In the main the story will be told as it was written over a century ago in the file Larkin's correspondence.
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