Sterling Saint James

Yda Addis's Travel Guide Sterling Saint James

While Yda Addis was a well known 19th century writer of stories with topics such as ghosts, unrequited love, and murder, however, as a travel writer little was known until now. She offers a rare look at the difficulties of 19th century travel in Mexico and the American Southwest. Here she introduces the Queer Mexicans as she calls them: venomous, "almost human-like," and edible! These oddities she presents mixed with her personal accounts of dangerous and close to death travel experiences, creates a Travel Guide like none other. Her father, Alfred Shea Addis, (A. S. Addis) was not known as a writer, but as an itinerant photographer. Through his journeys from towns in Arizona and New Mexico Territories, during the last phase of the Apache Wars, he expressed his disdain in dispatches to newspapers. When he described what he saw and what he experienced, he blamed the corrupt U. S. Politicians and the Military for not stopping the Apaches from slaughtering the settlers. However, between rages he mixed in quaint and charming views of Southwestern frontier life that entailed love, marriage, divorce and money.