Reminiscences of a Ranger: Or, Early Times in Southern California Bell, Horace Americana,Biography,Military & War

First edition, first printing. 457 pp. Bound in publisher's red cloth over beveled boards with pictorial stamping in black and gilt. Very Good+ with light rubbing and soiling to cloth, sunning to spine, and slight bumping to corners. Heavy offsetting to endpapers, light toning to contents, binding starting at p. 225. Howes 325, Zamorano 80 #5. Major Horace Bell was a founding member of the Los Angeles Rangers militia company, and after ten years of serving in the civil wars of Mexico and the United States he returned to California to become a successful businessman. Bell's memoir of the rough and ready justice of mid-19th century California, the first cloth-bound book to be published in Los Angeles, is described by Howes as "the most readable narrative of early California."