Albert Fenner Kercheval — Dolores; and Other Poems

Albert Fenner Kercheval carried the California gold camps into poetry long after leaving them behind. An 1849 overland migrant who became a Los Angeles farmer and horticulturist, he wrote with equal energy about mining slang, comradeship, bereavement, missions, courtship, agriculture, local politics, and the region’s rapid transformation. Dolores; and Other Poems mixes serious narrative, sentimental lyric, comic dialect, public occasion, and pioneer reminiscence; its range reflects a life divided between the memory of the Forty-Niners and the practical work of cultivating Southern California. The original volume also made poetry a family affair by including work by his daughter Rosalie. This edition restores Kercheval’s book as a major early Los Angeles collection—uneven, lively, historically dense, and full of the competing voices through which nineteenth-century Californians tried to turn experience into legend.