A Tragedy of the Sierra 
 
C.F. McGlashan. 
 
A.L. Bancroft & Company: 1881. Fourth edition, illustrated. Hardcover. Large octavo. Spine is leaning. Fraying shelfwear along the bottoms of the boards. Tip of the crown of the spine is worn down and exposed. A few stains on the cover. One of the signatures is a bit looser from the spine than the others. Tears on the edge of the first free endpaper. There are smudges or specks every five pages or less, but most of these are in the margins, and every twenty pages or so there is a fold from a former dog ear on a leaf. 260 pages. Good. 
 
McGlashan wrote this history a few decades after the horror to combat the legends inflating around the moment that captured Manifest Destiny's grisly underside. His diligence and good faith consisted in hundreds of interviews and thousands of letters of correspondence with the survivors. Add to this a clear talent as an unassuming historical narrator, and you are set to march, month by month, across the plains, into the Sierras and to the awful conclusion. 
 
"The delirium preceding death by starvation is full of strange phantasies."