Washington Irving’s friends and colleagues had warmly…

Washington Irving’s friends and colleagues had warmly welcomed his return to the United States from Spain in 1832.

A bachelor, Irving had in 1834 purchased a small estate on the Hudson River as a place of resort for members of his extensive family and begun work on his magnum opus, The Life of George Washington.

He had published an autobiographical account of his domestic westering in A Tour on the Prairies in 1835 and told of Astor's ill-fated commercial enterprise on the northwest Pacific Coast in Astoria, published in 1836.

In 1837, he writes of the American West in The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A.