# Is "The Old Santa Fe Trail" by Henry Inman a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of The Old Santa Fe Trail by Henry Inman (The Macmillan Company, 1897) is identified by: New York: The Macmillan Company, 1897, thick octavo, original pictorial brown cloth, gilt-lettered, top edge gilt, with a frontispiece portrait, eight plates after illustrations by Frederic Remington, numerous vignette initial letters and tailpieces by Thomson Willing, and a folding map.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- New York: The Macmillan Company, 1897, thick octavo, original pictorial brown cloth, gilt-lettered, top edge gilt, with a frontispiece portrait, eight plates after illustrations by Frederic Remington, numerous vignette initial letters and tailpieces by Thomson Willing, and a folding map
- The book is dedicated to Colonel William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, who also contributed the preface, and it is a standard popular history of the Santa Fe Trail written while surviving traders and freighters were still alive to be interviewed by Inman
- Inman was himself a frontier army veteran, credited on the title page as "Late Assistant Quartermaster, United States Army," who had served under Generals Sheridan and Custer during the Kansas Indian campaigns of the late 1860s
- Publisher imprint reads The Macmillan Company
- Not a book-club edition (see below)

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Henry Inman |
| Publisher | The Macmillan Company |
| Year | 1897 |
| True first | — |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | New York: The Macmillan Company, 1897, thick octavo, original pictorial brown cloth, gilt-lettered, top edge gilt, with a frontispiece… |
| Book-club edition exists? | — |

## Points of issue
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1897, thick octavo, original pictorial brown cloth, gilt-lettered, top edge gilt, with a frontispiece portrait, eight plates after illustrations by Frederic Remington, numerous vignette initial letters and tailpieces by Thomson Willing, and a folding map. The book is dedicated to Colonel William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, who also contributed the preface, and it is a standard popular history of the Santa Fe Trail written while surviving traders and freighters were still alive to be interviewed by Inman. Inman was himself a frontier army veteran, credited on the title page as "Late Assistant Quartermaster, United States Army," who had served under Generals Sheridan and Custer during the Kansas Indian campaigns of the late 1860s.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
Crane & Company of Topeka acquired the rights and issued its own reprintings under the Crane imprint beginning in 1899 and continuing over the following two decades; a copy bearing the Crane & Co. imprint rather than The Macmillan Company's is one of these later reprintings, not the 1897 first edition.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *The Old Santa Fe Trail* by Henry Inman a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/the-old-santa-fe-trail
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.