Source Information
Ancestry.com. Benjamin Avery, California Poetry and Prose, 1878 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 1999.Original data: Library of Congress. California As I Saw It: first-person narratives of California's early years, 1849-1900. Volume 22. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1999. Avery, Benjamin Parke. Californian Pictures in Prose and Verse. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1878.
About Benjamin Avery, California Poetry and Prose, 1878
In addition to men seeking their fortune in the gold fields, California drew educated professionals seeking a new life on the West Coast. Benjamin Avery was a New York journalist who moved to California in the 1850s and became part owner of the Marysville Appeal. This database is a collection of "word-sketches" Avery wrote that details the scenery and peoples of northern California. These essays and poems describe the Sierra Nevadas, Yosemite, and Mount Shasta among other areas. For those with ancestors from the area, this can be an illuminating look into the geography in which they lived.
New York journalist Benjamin Parke Avery (1828-1875) emigrated to California and became part owner of the Marysville Appeal in the 1850s and later published a newspaper in San Francisco and served as state printer. Californian pictures in prose and verse (1878) contains his "word-sketches," which are largely confined to California scenery, although some picture Native Americans and miners whom he knew when he prospected on the Trinity River in 1850 as well as the city of San Francisco. Most of the book is devoted to poems and essays dealing with mountains of the Coast Range, the Sierra Nevadas, and the Santa Cruz range and their passes and lakes; Yosemite, upper Sacramento Valley, Mount Shasta, and the geysers.
