Cragin Manuscript

The following are links to digital images (PDFs) of F. W. Cragin’s unpublished manuscripts for his Rocky Mountain Library. Cragin worked for 35 years to document and write the history of the American West, but died before it could be printed.

The scanning project was funded by a generous grant from the Colorado Digitization Project. The manuscripts available below are the only ones that have survived. In some cases the chapters are unfinished and/or incomplete. They have been divided into smaller sections in order to minimize download times.

• Table of Contents, 1906
• Table of Contents, 1906 (alternate version)
• Chapter 1: “The General Antecedents of the Fray Marcos Prodome of Coronado’s Expedition”
• Chapter 2: “Coronado’s Expedition to the Seven Cities of Cibola, and the Geography of his Route”
• Chapter 3: The Chichilticalli Fortress and the Red Land of the South”
• Supplement to Chapters 1, 2, and 3
• Chapter 5: “On the Trail of Moscoso, 1542”
• Chapter 6: “The Cadadaquious and the Post of the Nassonites”
• Chapter 7: The Caddo Old Towns and Fort Saint Louis de Carlorette”
• Chapter 8: “The Caddoes in the Nineteenth Century”
• Chapter 9: “First Glimpses of Colorado”
• Chapter 10: “El Cuartelejo”
• Chapter 11: The Disastrous Expedition of Villasur, from Santa Fe to the Missouri Valley in 1720″
• Chapter 13: “The First French Post in Kansas”
• Chapter 14: “Early French Quests of Overland Routes and Trade with New Mexico”
• Chapter 15: “The Fabry Fiasco of 1741-1742”
• Chapter 16: “Some French Voyageurs to and from New Mexico in the Last Half of the Eighteenth Century”
• Chapter 19: “Expeditions of Rocky Mountain Traders and Trappers”
• Chapter 22: “Long’s Expedition to the Rocky Mountains”
• Chapter 23: “Bent’s Fort”
• Chapter 25: “The Old Divide Trail Through Jimmy Camp and the Black Squirrel Pineries”
• Chapter 26: “Jimmy Camp, the Fancies and the Facts”
• Chapter 29: “Some Old Time Winters of the Far West”
• Chapter 33: “The Massacre at Old Fort El Pueblo”
• Chapter 34: “Marcy’s Rocky Mountain Expedition of 1857-1858”