History of California

California from the mission fathers and the Spanish ranchos through the Bear Flag and the gold rush to statehood, written for schools by a woman whose family had lived it. Bandini had married into a Californio landowning family, and the book is unusual for its date in giving the Mexican period as history rather than prelude. The gold-rush chapters are brisk and unromantic about what the diggings did to the people already there. Sixty plates by Cole, Durand, Bierstadt and others carry the American landscape from Catskill lakes to Long Island Sound, matching a history that moves from mission days to the Pacific shore.