James Ross Larkin — Reluctant Frontiersman (UNM Press, 1990, first edition)

What this book is

James Ross Larkin (1831–1875) was a wealthy St. Louis-bred businessman who, in the fall of 1856, was a perennial dyspeptic. He’d heard about other sickly young men whose health had been restored by a season on the Santa Fe Trail — the “prairie cure” was a real Victorian-era therapeutic notion — and he set out from St. Louis to test it on his own constitution. He joined the seasonal caravan of William Bent (the legendary trader at Bent's Old Fort in present-day Colorado) and made the trip to Santa Fe and back over the winter of 1856–57.

His diary survived in family hands for over a century before Barton H. Barbour, then a UNM doctoral candidate, located it, transcribed it, and prepared the scholarly edition that became this book. Marc Simmons — the prolific Santa Fe-based historian and dean of NM popular history (Marc Simmons of the Albuquerque Journal “Trail Dust” column, multiple Spur Award winner) — wrote the foreword. The book's appendices include the inventory of goods Larkin carried (a rich source for material-culture historians), his letters of introduction, and his notes on the Plains Indians and New Mexicans he encountered.

The diary itself is the principal text: 122 days of trail life, recorded by an urban businessman without literary pretension, who saw the trail with the eyes of a tourist and the constitution of an invalid. As Marc Simmons notes in his foreword, this is precisely what makes the document valuable — the trail had been described by professional travelers, soldiers, and commercial freighters; Larkin describes it from the unusual angle of the bourgeois health-seeker.

Why this copy matters

Marc Simmons forewords are not collector-grade signature material on their own — he wrote dozens over a long career — but they reliably add scholarly authority to a NM-history volume, and the books with his name on the cover are the ones that find their way into NM university libraries and into private collections of regional history. Simmons died in 2023; his signature pool is now closed, and a Larkin-Simmons combination on a UNM Press first edition is a small but real reference asset.

Barton H. Barbour went on to a career as professor of history at Boise State University and as a leading scholar of the fur trade and the antebellum American West. Reluctant Frontiersman was an early work; his subsequent books include Fort Union and the Upper Missouri Fur Trade (University of Oklahoma Press, 2001) and Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009).

This copy carries a faint pencil notation on the front free endpaper that appears to read “Plaza” or similar — consistent with a long-ago Santa Fe bookstore stamp or a private prior owner. No other markings; the book is in clean, unread paperback condition.

Multi-part bibliographic record

How it came in

Donated in May 2026 through NMLP. Donor scenario anonymized per archive policy. Book in clean paperback condition, faint pencil notation on front free endpaper, otherwise unmarked.

Where it's going

Likely route: Santa Fe Trail historian, mid-19th-century western-US specialist, NM regional collector, or a UNM-history student building a primary-sources shelf. The book is out of print; clean copies of the 1990 first edition are findable but a Marc Simmons foreword adds incremental value.