Dreams to dust

the long version

With a high sense of adventure and even higher hope of profit, Dr. Charles Ross Parke joined the gold seekers streaming toward California in the spring of 1849. A resident of Whiteside County, Illinois, he formed a small company and headed west to the Great Platte River Road. Other forty-niners kept diaries of daily events on the trail, but Dr. Parke's is unusual in its scope and detail. Edited, annotated, and published for the first time, this book reveals an anthropologist's curiosity about Indians and their culture, a young man's eye for the ladies, a sociologist's sense of the roles people play, a politician's instincts for the art of governance, and a doctor's view of the cholera pandemic along the trail. Dr. Parke had more to say than most contemporary diarists about the journey across northern Illinois, Iowa, northern Missouri, and beyond South Pass. Unlike most gold rushers, he continued his diary amid the gaudy attractions of California. When his luck did not pan out in the gold fields he was one of the few to return east by way of Mexico and Nicaragua. The portion of his diary dealing with Nicaragua is rare for its personal glimpses of social and political conditions in that country in 1850. -- from Book Jacket.