10412.h.8

Imprint: Boston: Alexander Moore. Lee and Shepard. New York: Lee, Shepard and Dillingham. 1872.

Green cloth octavo, measuring 265 x 180 mm, with title and decorative design stamped in gilt on upper board and in blind on lower. The volumes contains ten small albumen prints views of scenery in the Yosemite Valley by Robert J. Soule, that were copyrighted by the photographer at the Library of Congress in 1870. The work serves as a guide book to the Yosemite Valley, clearly conceived in response to the growing popularity of the area for tourists, and designed to boost that growing market. In his preface, Kneeland is at pains to emphasize the growing ease of access offered by the railrod system: 'The first and only difficulty in the journey to the Pacific is, to get started; that accomplished, with comfortable cars, good food, easy bed, and other luxuries of the Pullman and Wagner palaces, the traveller of ordinary endurance and common-sense has only to take his ease and enjoy himself; if, to the above simple qualifications, he fortunately add a natural love of the picturesque, the grand, and the beautiful, I know of no journey on the face of the earth in which so much enjoyment can be crowded into a month's time ... This magnificent scenery is easily within reach of the invalid, male or female, who is not so hopelessly enfeebled as to forbid, under any circumstances, removal from home.' Furthermore, the scenery of the west offered a moral corrective to the decadence of the east coast: 'The beauties and wonders described in this book, however, are not presented for the benefit of the sick, but to the crowd of pleasure-seekers who make their annual visitations to Niagara, Newport, Saratoga, Cape May, and other centres of fashion, foppery and folly. With half the expenditure of money and vital force thus thrown away, to the moral and physical deterioration of all concerned, the California trip, via the Pacific Railroad, may be thoroughly enjoyed ... The brain of the student and the overworked merchant can here lie fallow amid scenes which, by their strange fascination, will drive from the memory all thought of books and ledgers; even the love of dress, and the pursuit of fashions, leave their votaries, as they take their seat in the saddle for the Valley of the Big Trees ...'