author

D. B. (Dolly B.) Bates

1826–1908

A spirited memoirist of the Gold Rush era, she turned disaster-filled voyages and rough Pacific Coast life into a vivid firsthand adventure. Her best-known book captures shipwrecks, travel, and the everyday grit of early California.

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 in Kingston, Massachusetts, Dolly Bryant Bates Hyde is remembered for Incidents on Land and Water, or Four Years on the Pacific Coast, a memoir first published in 1857 and later reissued. Contemporary library and archival notes describe her as a Massachusetts native who sailed to California in 1850 with her husband, a ship captain, and later helped run a hotel in Marysville during the early 1850s.

What makes her writing stand out is how directly it draws on lived experience. Incidents on Land and Water recounts a dramatic journey marked by fires at sea, wrecks, and the hazards of travel and settlement along the Pacific Coast, giving readers a rare personal view of life around the Gold Rush years.

She died in 1908. Although not widely known today, her memoir remains valuable as an energetic eyewitness account of westward travel, maritime danger, and frontier life in nineteenth-century America.