Lewis H. Garrard's niche in Western American literature is founded on a single book, Wah-to-yah, and the Taos Trail: or Prairie Travel and Scalp Dances, with a Look at Los Rancheros from Muleback and the Rocky Mountain Campfire (1850), which recounts the author's ten-month journey (September 1846-July 1847), at age seventeen, along the Santa Fe and Taos Trails of the American Southwest. He presents a vivid and invaluable record of life among the Cheyenne Indians, traders, and mountain men and provides the only eyewitness account of the April 1847 trials and executions of the Taos insurgents. Valued by western scholars as anthropologically accurate, historically authentic, and stylistically refreshing, Wah-to-yah has won an enduring place among the several firsthand accounts of the Santa Fe Trail.

Lewis Hector Garrard (he was christened Hector Lewis Garrard but changed the order of his given names in his youth) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 15 June...