Hubert Howe Bancroft was the first historian to produce a comprehensive account of the history of the American Far West. Anticipating the twentieth-century historical school of the "Spanish Borderlands," he included Mexico and Central America in his definition of the American West. Prior to his work as a historian, Bancroft was a successful West Coast book and stationery dealer as well as a publisher. His sixty-thousand-volume library, which furnished the sources for his history, was later sold to the University of California at Berkeley, where it served as the basis for the University's priceless collection of Western Americana, the Bancroft Collection.

Descended from New England stock, Bancroft was born 5 May 1832 at Granville, Ohio, the son of Azariah Ashley and Lucy Howe Bancroft. The Bancroft and Howe families had migrated from Massachusetts and Vermont prior to 1815. The first American Bancroft, John, had arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from...