J. Smeaton Chase was an Englishman who landed in Southern California in 1890, wandered it on horseback for thirty years, and wrote it down. This one came out in 1919, after he’d settled in Palm Springs when it was still nothing but a hot spring and a few houses. He rides a loop around the Colorado Desert, out past the Salton Sea and the Chocolate Mountains and over to the Colorado River, and he does a good chunk of it in summer, which the appendix on desert travel practically tells you not to do. He stops at every hermit, prospector, and Cahuilla family he crosses and lets them talk. The plant and animal writing is exact enough to still work as a field record, and he was pushing to protect the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto ranges decades before anyone listened. Still, it’s dated—probably for Mojave fans only.