L. W. Currey, Inc.

FIFER, J. VALERIE. American Progress[:] the growth of the transport, tourist, and information industries in the nineteenth-century West seen through the life and times of George A. Crofutt, pioneer and publicist of the transcontinental age[.] By J. Valerie Fifer. Chester, Connecticut: The Globe Pequot Press, [1988]. 24.1x16 cm, pp. [1-4] [i-ii] iii-xi [xii] 1-472, color frontispiece, 116 illustrations, 16 maps, original red cloth, spine panel stamped in gold. First edition. The first detailed study of the development of the western guidebook industry that enticed thousands of Easterners and Europeans to visit the American West. "Selling the West included exploiting the region's immense scenic and climatic resources. This richly illustrated volume reveals how western America's tourist industry was created, expanded, consolidated, and diversified between 1869 and 1900, an exuberant period that produced a range of styles, prices and services often assumed to be a feature of the twentieth century. From luxury hotels to tent cities, grand tours to cheap day trips, organized excursions to 'free-to-wander' tickets, health spas to dude ranches, Fifer traces the changing demands of the seventies, eighties and nineties, and documents the fierce competition between California and Colorado for the tourist's dollar ... The story is told through the life and times of George A. Crofutt, one of the most successful western guidebook writers of the era" (publisher's jacket copy). "Fifer's richly layered book presents a whole series of western geographies (not frontiers) that are seldom addressed by western historians, in presenting these geographies, Fifer at once clarifies the way in which we should look at the post-Turnerian West ... This is a very significant book, one happily dealing with the intellectual history of the West, or at least with that other progressive West of the imagination that we seldom see because it is a landscape without violence or savagery or nostalgia ... Fifer has indeed given us many geographies to consider in this fine book" (American Historical Review). A fine copy in nearly fine dust jacket with mild wear/rubs at edges. (#166428).