Journal of an Indian Trader: Anthony Glass and the Texas Trading Frontier, 1790-1810 (Volume 4)

Texas A&M Southwestern Studies

by Dan Flores (Editor)

A decade before the celebrated mountain men entered the Northern Plains and Rockies, some dozen little-known trading forays were launched into the plains of the Southwest. Anthony Glass led one of the most important.

In 1808–1809, with a party of twelve hunter-traders, he acted as semi-official emissary of the U.S. government in the practically uncharted lands of the Taovaya-Wichita and Comanche Indians. His was the first party of whites ever to view the sixteen-hundred-pound meteorite venerated as a healing shrine by the Plains tribes. Alone among the early southwestern traders, Glass kept a lively journal detailing his route and experiences.

Forgotten for nearly two centuries, this journal appears here in its entirety with rich annotation and interpretation by editor Dan L. Flores. Flores offers a novel, sympathetic view of the Indian trader as a sometime instrument of Jeffersonian borderlands diplomacy, and he presents fresh data on the land and its inhabitants.

Landscape, photographs, historically important frontier maps, and contemporary paintings of the traders and the Indians, and their ways of life, further develop this tale of Anthony Glass, Indian trader.

Genres: History

152 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1984

About the author

Dan Flores is an environmental writer who from 1992 to 2014 held the A. B. Hammond Chair in the History of the American West at the University of Montana. A native of Louisiana and currently a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, he has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Time Magazine. Along with appearances on Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown on CNN and on Joe Rogan's podcasts, he was a consultant for and is featured in Ken Burns's 2023 documentary on the story of the American buffalo. Flores's eleven books and numerous essays have won nearly three-dozen literary prizes. His most recent works are American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, winner of the Stubbendieck Distinguished Book Prize in 2017; Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History, a 2017 New York Times Bestseller that won the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award and was a Finalist for PEN America’s E. O. Wilson Prize in Literary Science Writing; and Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America, a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2022.