PBA Galleries

Illustrated with color wood engravings by Mallette Dean. 11¼x7¾, cloth backed patterned boards, paper spine label. 1 of 500 copies printed by the Grabhorn Press. First Separate Book Edition.

Poe's story of a journey into the Yellowstone region made before Lewis and Clark, first published in six installments in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, and Monthly American Review, Vol. VI, Philadelphia, Jan.-June, 1849, with the subtitle, "Being an Account of the First Passage Across the Rocky Mountains of North America Ever Achieved by Civilized Man." Wagner-Camp calls it "an amalgam of fact, fiction, and conjecture," and James D. Hart, in The Oxford Companion to American Literature, writes that "the character of Rodman and the dates are fictitious, but the adventures and descriptions are based on fact, being largely paraphrased from Irving's Astoria and the account of Lewis and Clark and Sir Alexander Mackenzie" - Wagner-Camp 82 (note); GB 443.