Josiah Gregg's two-volume Commerce of the Prairies; or, the Journal of a Santa Fé Trader, during Eight Expeditions across the Great Western Prairies, and a Residence of Nearly Nine s in Northern Mexico (1844) has earned him an undisputed place at the forefront of literary historians of the early American West. Called "a classic in the literature of Western history" by Reuben Gold Thwaites, the editor of a 1905 edition, Commerce of the Prairies combines Gregg's firsthand account of life along the Santa FeTrail in the 1830s with his astute and generally accurate observations of the natural history and topology of the region as well as the history and anthropology of its various peoples. Commerce of the Prairies, asserts Hiram Martin Chittenden in his own classic, The American Fur-Trade of the Far West (1902), is "one of the great works of American history."

Josiah Gregg was born on 19 July 1806 in...