Hutchings' Illustrated California Magazine

Publisher and promoter James Hutchings was born in Towcester, England, and in 1848 came to the United States along with a vast wave of Europeans that were escaping a maelstrom of economic, political and religious oppression in the late 1840s.

In addition to attracting settlers to the west coast, the gold rush also brought technology, in particular printing presses, and Hutchings learned to make a moderately lucrative living publishing and selling letter sheets, which were printed broad sheets purposely left blank on the back so they could be used to write letters, something akin to large-format postcards.

Aside from making a living selling the letter sheets, as Hutchings traveled around California he gained a sense of what was important in the popular mind and came up with the idea of an illustrated magazine.

Each issue contained travel narratives, ranging from simple day trips out of San Francisco to arduous trans-Sierra treks.

The magazine popularized a number of well-known legendary stories of the West including the Pony Express, Grizzly Adams and Snowshoe Thompson.