The diary records an 1874 voyage from New York via Panama to California. The unidentified author describes the weather, the ship's progress, shipboard life, Aspinwall (Colón), Panama, the train trip across the Isthmus, the landscape and villages, Acapulco, and the voyage to San Francisco. There is a detailed description of San Francisco and more information on California towns, agriculture, mining, flora and fauna. The diary also chronicles a train trip from Rocklin, California to Reno, Nevada, where the author found work on an alfalfa farm. The author continued overland by train through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska to Chicago and then Detroit. The author traveled to New York by way of Niagara Falls and The volume includes illustrations of California, Nevada, and Niagara Falls as well as maps of the railroad routes. There is a list of the illustrations and a list of plants identified. The author also created an abstract of the diary in the back of the volume
Subject (Geographic):
Nevada., United States., West (U.S.), Acapulco (Mexico), Colón (Panama), California, Niagara Falls (N.Y. and Ont.), Nevada, Panama, Salt Lake City (Utah), and San Francisco (Calif.)
Subject (Name):
Central Pacific Railroad Company., Colon (Steamship), Montana (Steamship), Panama Railroad Co., and Union Pacific Railroad Company.
Subject (Topic):
Agriculture, Alfalfa, Railroad travel, and Description and travel
Photographs of copper and gold mining activities, camps and miners in Nevada and California, and of a trail ride through the Grand Canyon in Arizona. In Nevada there are views of the Mohawk Mine in Goldfield, the J. R. Crawford Copper Mine and camp near Schurz, and the boom town of Rawhide, Photographs of California include views of Mt. Grant, Mt. Wilson, the San Gabriel Range of the Sierra Nevada Mountains along the Arroyo Seco, and the Tarantula Mine, There are also photographic and photomechanical postcards, many in color, depicting Donner Lake, Sonora, Sacremento and San Francisco in California, and views of Reno and the mining towns of Goldfield and Tonopah, Nevada. A double-postcard depicts a panoramic view of the Truckee River and dam. Two postcards are addressed to J. Randall Crawford at the Princeton Club in New York and a third is addressed to Mrs. J. R. Crawford in England, and J. R. Crawford is present in many of the photographs, including an interior view of the Tarantula Mine eight hundred feet below the surface
Description:
Detailed manuscript captions are in the hand of J.R. Crawford. Several photographs and all of the postcards are views by commercial photographers in Nevada and California (Kennedy, Larson, Mitchell, Owens, Rieder, and Weidner). and Jack Randall Crawford received his B.S. and M.A. from Princeton University (1901, 1903). From 1909 to 1946 he was an Associate Professor of English at Yale University.
Subject (Geographic):
Nevada., California., Goldfield (Nev.), Reno (Nev.), Ragtown (Nev.), Tonopah (Nev.), Nevada, Sierra Madre Mountains (Calif.), California, and Grand Canyon (Ariz.)
Subject (Name):
Crawford, Jack Randall, 1878- and Tarantula Mine (Calif.)
Subject (Topic):
Gold mines and mining, Copper mines and mining, and Mines and mineral resources
