The Western Travel Collection is an artificial, or subject-based, collection comprising a variety of documents that have been placed in this collection over the years due to their common subject matter. The collection consists primarily of accounts of travel in the nineteenth-century American West, but also includes material relating to western travel in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The collection includes correspondence, newspaper clippings, and journals and diaries. Many items are typescript copies, rather than original documents. The collection is arranged chronologically.