A Devonport Boy Comes to America: A Portion of My History

Samuel Roskelleys autobiography written for the benefit of his family shows that he could tell a story--his story--and make it live in words and images that make reading it a pleasure even more than a hundred and a quarter years after it was first set down. The writer was a literate mid-nineteenth century English immigrant to Utah Territory. He arrived in the Great Basin at a time when travel really was a life-in-your-hands adventure. The section selected and presented here is only the first part of a longer incomplete work. As presented in these pages Samuel begins his account in an English port city and concludes as a dusty footsore trail-worn young man arrives in a corner of an entirely foreign world he had decided--without ever seeing it--to call home.