A TRIP TO BODIE BLUFF and the Dead Sea of the West (Mono Lake)--in 1863.

written and illustrated by J. Ross Browne.

The adventures of a noted humorist of the 1860s during an excursion at their heyday to the mines of Bodie, Aurora, and the Mono Lake region. Author Browne was a man of many hats: he was a minerals engineer, an almost politician, locator of coastal post offices in California, recorder and publisher of California's constitutional convention, and writer and artist for Harper's New Monthly Magazine. Browne's writing is not of the "superlative" or romantic variety popular at his time; instead Browne found fun in the foibles of man's endeavors--and poked at them. In fact, Mark Twain's earlier writings were on this same region of eastern California and central Nevada, and the incidents and even the illustrations in Twain's works seem to have been inspired by Browne's preceding writing. Today, we can still see vestiges of some of the scenes Browne saw, for California maintains Bodie today in "a state of arrested decay" as a state park. Park visitors will better understand the scene with these insights from an earlier visitor. Illustrated, 72 pages.