Description
Charles E. Merrill Co., Inc. (affiliated with American Education Press), Published 1949. Wraps, 32 pp.; 21 cm; staple bound; illustrated throughout in black and white with a mix of reproductions of nineteenth-century engravings, original line drawings, two state maps (the growth of the United States, the western trails), and several documentary photographs including the famous Promontory Point golden-spike scene of 1869 closing the volume. The text is set within alternating red and teal decorative chapter borders.
Condition & notes
In good condition. Yellow paper covers with a bold black illustration on the front of a frontiersman on horseback waving his hat above as a wagon train winds through the hills behind him, signed at the lower right by the cover artist. Mild shelf wear and light bumping to corners and edges, with light surface soiling overall. Staple binding tight and square. Interior pages lightly toned but otherwise unmarked, with scattered light foxing along the inner edge of the back cover.Number 509 in the Little Wonder Books series, originally a set of ninety thirty-two-page booklets co-published by Charles E. Merrill Co. and American Education Press in the mid- to late 1940s. The series was designed for readers aged six to twelve, with each booklet treating one unit of social-studies or science material on the child's level and originally priced low for classroom and home use. The 500-series titles, distinguished by their bright yellow covers, address American geography, civics, industry, and natural resources. "Winning the West" carries young readers from Yorktown in 1781 through the closing of the frontier with the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869, taking in Daniel Boone and the Ohio Valley, the Louisiana Purchase, the Texas Republic and the war with Mexico, the mountain men, the wagon trains, the Mormon migration, the Oregon dispute and the "Fifty-four Forty or Fight" presidential campaign, the Gold Rush, and the long story of broken treaties with the Indian nations. The husband-and-wife authors are Violet Fee and Walter R. Fee, Ph.D., who collaborated on a number of educational social-studies booklets for Charles E. Merrill and the older Educational Printing House.Contents: A New Nation (the United States in 1783); Winning the Ohio Valley; West Toward the Pacific (the Louisiana Purchase, 1803); Lone Star Republic; Trappers, Beavers, and Indians; The Wagon Trains Come; The Mormons and the West; The Oregon Story; Golden California; The Beginning of the End.
