Biography & Autobiography. History. Nonfiction. HTML:The gripping nineteenth century memoir of death, despair, heroism, and a will to survive during the California Gold Rush.

Hit by Gold Rush fever in 1849, a wagon train headed for the California coast stumbled into a 130-mile-long valley in the Mojave Desert. The men, women, and children were swallowed up by the hostile valley with its dry and waterless terrain, unearthly surface of white salts, and overwhelming heat. Assaulted and devastated by the elements, members of the camp killed their emaciated oxen for food, quickly ran out of water, and one by one, buried those who perished. They were lost beyond hope, until twenty-nine-year-old William Lewis Manly, and his companion, John Rogers, decided to cross the treacherous Panamint Mountains by themselves in search for rescue.

Manly lived to tell the tale, and forty-five years later he didâ??in this gripping autobiography, first published in 1894. Manly's stirring account brings alive the unimaginable hardships of the American pioneers who gave Death Valley its name, and a chapter in Californian history that "will both enlighten and renew your faith in humanity" (Tulsa World).