resource for writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. George Caleb Bingham depicted Daniel Boone as a Moses-like figurative in “The Emigration of Daniel Boone into Kentucky.” With the “Country Election” Bingham begins his “Election” series, the paintings depicted the democratic process in the West. James Fenimore Cooper, author of the Leatherstocking novels, died in his home in Cooperstown, New York, the basis for the fictional settlement in Cooper’s “The Pioneers.” George Copway briefly published a newspaper devoted to Native Americans, “Copway’s American Indian.” John James Audubon, naturalist, painter, and author of “Birds of America,” died. In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” San Francisco’s “Golden Era,” a literary journal, begins publication. In 1853, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet published his novel, “Flush Times.” Old Block (Alonzo Delano) collected his “Pacific News” articles, which were humorous sketches about life in Gold Rush San Francisco. For the first time San Francisco had its own resident opera company, “The Pacific Musical Troupe.” Asher B. Durand painted “Progress (The Advance of Civilization),” commissioned by railroad baron Charles Gould. In 1854, Margaret Jewell Bailey published “The Grains,” and John Rollin Ridge published a ninety-page novel, “The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit.” Ridge was a Cherokee Indian from Arkansas who went West during the Gold Rush. Finding little gold, he became a California journalist and the first Native American novelists. Henry David Thoreau published “Walden, Or Life in the Woods,” a work that would end up having an enormous impact on the way American Writers viewed nature. In 1855, Augusta J. Evan...
