PBA Galleries

2 volumes.  [2], xii, [13]-405; xii, [11]-406 pp. Five steel-engraved plates; folding engraved map. (8vo) 20x12 cm. (8x4¾"), rebound in green cloth with original covers and spines laid down, spines lettered in gilt with gilt vignette of a buffalo hunter. First Edition.

First edition of this important account of the invasion of Mexican-controlled New Mexico by the forces of the Republic of Texas. As Wagner-Camp describes: "Kendall's book is the best first-hand story of the ill-fated invasion of New Mexico in 1841, an unsuccessful effort to extend the western border of the Republic of Texas to the Rio Grande. The Texans, poorly supplied and led, were captured by the Mexicans and marched to prison in Mexico City. Kendall was later released and he returned to New Orleans and his newspaper, the `Picayune,' which he had helped to establish five years earlier. Accounts of some of the incidents first appeared in print in a series of articles in that newspaper in 1842 and subsequently [& partially plagiarized from Kendall] in Frederick Marryat's `Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet'. The map in Volume I, often lacking, is "Texas and Part of Mexico & The United States, showing the Route of The First Santa Fé Expedition" (40x29.2 cm).