"The Journey West" has heretofore been written about on occasion by a variety of scholars and enthusiasts.  Most often, their information was based upon one of the following secondary sources:

• Sanborn, Franklin B.  First and Last Journeys of Thoreau, Lately Discovered Among His Unpublished  Journals and Manuscripts.  Volume Two.  Boston:  The Bibliophile Society, 1905.     [read it online]     [find it in a library]

• Harding, Walter, ed.  Thoreau’s Minnesota Journey: Two Documents:  Thoreau’s Notes 

  on the Journey West and The Letters of Horace Mann, Jr.   Geneseo, N.Y.:  The 

  Thoreau Society (Thoreau Society Booklet No. Sixteen), 1962.  [find it in a library]

• A typewritten transcription prepared by Mabel Densmore [Quarto 917.68 T39a], on file at the Owen H. Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Henry Thoreau's original 100-page field notebook about "The Journey West" is owned by The Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

A new annotated transcription of each page in Thoreau's field notebook will soon be available online with The Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods Library.

New:

• Smith, Corinne Hosfeld.  "What a Difference a Year Can Make:  Henry David Thoreau and the Grand Pleasure Excursion of 1861."  Minnesota's Heritage #4, July 2011.  Copyright 2011, Minnesota's Heritage.     [read the article online]     [purchase a copy of the issue]