A ROOM FOR THE NIGHT: Hotels of the Old West

A pleasant register of facts and anecdotage, authenticated early Americana about the opening up of the West and the places where one could ""light and fill up"" from 1830 to 1890--road ranches (""as civilized as an African hut""), prairie dugouts, on to the two story shanties of early San Francisco (""a tinderbox not bigger than a hen-coop"") where a hundred people were bedded down in a room at a dollar each. Then there was the clergyman given the still warm bed of a smallpox patient. Mr. Van Orman's account, all based on contemporary materials, moves with the expansion westward from Texas to Missouri to the coast, includes details of how staffed and served, and closes on a more creature-comfortable note with the resort hotels of the close of the century.