author

D. B. (Dolly B.) Bates

1826–1908

A lively 19th-century memoirist, she turned shipwrecks, overland travel, and Gold Rush–era California into a vivid firsthand adventure. Her best-known book offers a rare personal view of danger, resilience, and everyday life on the Pacific coast.

1 Audiobook

Incidents on land and water : or, Four years on the Pacific coast; being a narrative of the burning of the ships Nonantum, Humayoon, and Fanchon, together with many startling and interesting adventures on sea and land

Incidents on land and water : or, Four years on the Pacific coast; being a narrative of the burning of the ships Nonantum, Humayoon, and Fanchon, together with many startling and interesting adventures on sea and land

by D. B. (Dolly B.) Bates

About the author

Born in 1826, Dolly Bryant Bates Hyde was the daughter of Peleg and Dorothy Bradford Bryant. Sources describe her as growing up in Kingston, Massachusetts, and later becoming known for her humor and wit.

She is best remembered for writing Incidents on Land and Water; or, Four Years on the Pacific Coast, published in 1857 and often linked to the name Mrs. D. B. Bates. The book draws on her own travels with her husband, William Bates, including sea voyages, shipboard disasters, time in Gold Rush–era Marysville, California, and a return journey by way of Panama.

That memoir remains her best-known work because it blends travel writing, survival narrative, and social observation in a direct, personal voice. She died in 1908, and her writing still stands out as a rare firsthand account of a woman moving through the hazards and upheavals of the mid-19th-century American West.