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The Princeton Collections of Western Americana
were born with the 1947 gift of the collection of imprints and manuscripts
focused on overland narratives, the cattle trade, and the Rocky Mountain
West gathered by Philip Ashton Rollins, Class of 1889. Mr. Rollins was
a gentleman scholar whose book on the cowboy is widely admired. This
gift of Rollins and his wife, Beulah (Pack) Rollins, not only reoriented
all previous acquisitions in the subject at Princeton, but remains a
lodestone attracting other Western collections.
When the Rollins collection took its place in the new quarters of the
Department of Rare Books and Special Collections in the newly opened
Firestone Library, Princeton's interest in the American West was clearly
set out. In 1962, when a curator to the collection was appointed, the
strengths in Princeton's holdings on the West - the American Indian,
indigenous languages and peoples of Mesoamerica, the Rocky Mountain
states, the Spanish Southwest, the Mormons, territorial imprints, and
the popular image of the West - were especially pursued. The Garrett
Collection of Manuscripts in Indigenous Languages of Mesoamerica - the
most comprehensive gathering of manuscripts in Mayan languages in the
country- found a home in the collection and is being cataloged. The
Sheldon Jackson collection of photographs of American Indians - some
1600 albumen prints given to Princeton in 1880 - was rescued from the
open stacks, and has been vigourosly supplemented by purchase and gift.
J. Monroe Thorington of the Class of 1915, a physician, alpine historian,
and explorer of watersheds in the Canadian Rockies, was also a book
collector. Thorington's family were Forty-niners in California and Fifty-niners
in the Colorado mines. One Thorington served as mayor of Davenport,
Iowa in the years of its crucial importance as an outfitting center
for westward migration. Another Thorington was consul at Aspinwall,
in the path of western migration via the Panama route. Members of the
Thorington family ran surveys for western railroads and were friends
of Kit Carson, living in Taos and Santa Fe in the heyday of the Santa
Fe Trail. Given this background, it was natural that once Thorington
enriched the Princeton library's holdings of alpine materials, he would
turn to building a collection of Western Americana. The Thorington collection
expanded Princeton's holdings to include more on the Canadian West and
to concentrate particularly on the Southwest and its Indian populations.
Collecting with great enthusiasm in his last years, Thorington made
a generous bequest of an endowment to be used for acquisitions. This
is the base of the collections' additions today.
With the guidance of Alfonso Ortiz, a member of San Juan Pueblo and
also a professor of anthropology at Princeton, the collections on the
indigenous peoples of the Southwest and 20th-centiury Indian affairs
were enriched to include such archives as that of the Association
on American Indian Affairs and a series of private
papers concerning the crusade to return Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo.
Among many other collectors whose gifts have enriched the collection
are J. Lionberger Davis, Class of 1900, who enabled us to add many significant
territorial imprints; Thomas Baird, Class of 1945, whose interests included
Nebraska and Indians, and David Pierce, Class of 1967, who continues
to add Mormon publications to the holdings. Princeton's Mormon collection,
especially for the Utah territorial period, is probably the most comprehensive
outside Utah. A collection of ephemeral works on Colorado mines is a
memorial to John Charles Amesse, Class of 1964. And, in recent years,
a generous Yale man, William Reese, who happens also to be the pre-eminent
dealer in Western Americana, has enriched Princeton's holdings on the
cattle trade by his gifts.
Email: rbsc@princeton.edu
Telephone: (609) 258-3184 Fax: (609) 258-2324
http://
www.princeton.edu
/~rbsc/department/western/index.shtml
Last modified
Tuesday, 14-Feb-2006 16:03:26 EST
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