Jeanne Hamilton Watson is an inveterate trail explorer. For more than two decades she and her husband Bill have been investigating the famous Carson Emigrant Road, which took the forty-niners over the High Sierra from the Nevada deserts. It was during those studies that she happened across the diary of Lorena Hays. She concluded, as have other trail scholars, that it ought to be published. As the sensitivity of Lorena"s journalism grew on Watson, the annotating began. The result: a book of commanding importance, not just for the trail ore it imparts, but because this is the one nineteenth century emigrant diary which covers not only the trip across the plains, but the years in the Midwest before that trip began, and the years in California after it ended.