Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Blazing a Wagon Trail to Oregon is the story of a determined group of American pioneers who set out to move their families on wheeled vehicles from the settled frontier in Missouri to the far Pacific shore. Their incentive was simple enough. Times were tough in 1843, and they had heard of a lush new land existing in a place called Oregon, a land ready to be settled by hard-working farmers. Although a new life seemed to await them just over the horizon, none of them suspected how formidable that horizon really was. Diaries, letters home, and later reminiscences tell their stories and document their emotional responses to their experiences. Beginning with the earliest assembly of wagons outside the frontier town of Independence, Missouri, the reader follows "this grand adventure" to its conclusion six months later in Oregon. By introducing the various participants through a weekly chronicle, the author enables readers to view these shared experiences from sometimes revealingly different angles of vision. In effect, readers themselves become vicarious members of the train.
The story of America’s westward migration is a powerful blend of fact and fable. Over the course of three decades, almost a million eager fortune-hunters, pioneers, and visionaries transformed the face of a continent—and displaced its previous inhabitants. The people who made the long and perilous journey over the Oregon and California trails drove this swift and astonishing change. In this magisterial volume, Will Bagley tells why and how this massive emigration began. While many previous authors have told parts of this story, Bagley has recast it in its entirety for modern readers. Drawing on research he conducted for the National Park Service’s Long Distance Trails Office, he has woven a wealth of primary sources—personal letters and journals, government documents, newspaper reports, and folk accounts—into a compelling narrative that reinterprets the first years of overland migration. Illustrated with photographs and historical maps, So Rugged and Mountainous is the first of a projected four-volume history, Overland West: The Story of the Oregon and California Trails. This sweeping series describes how the “Road across the Plains” transformed the American West and became an enduring part of its legacy. And by showing that overland emigration would not have been possible without the cooperation of Native peoples and tribes, it places American Indians at the center of trail history, not on its margins.
Resurrecting a pivotal moment in American history, Across the Great Divide tells the triumphant never-before-told story of the young Scottish fur trader and explorer who discovered the way West, changing the face of the country forever. In the heroic tradition of Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage comes the story of Robert Stuart and his trailblazing discovery of the Oregon Trail. Lewis and Clark had struggled across the high Rockies in present-day Montana and Idaho, but their route had been too perilous for wagon trains to follow. Then, six years after the Corps of Discovery returned from the Pacific, Stuart found the route that would make westward migration possible. Setting out in 1812 on the return trip from establishing John Jacob Astor's fur trading post at Astoria on the Oregon Coast, Stuart and six companions traveled from west to east for more than 3,000 grueling miles by canoe, horseback, and ultimately by foot, following the mountains south until they came upon the one gap in the 3,000-mile-long Rocky Mountain chain that was passable by wagon. Situated in southwest Wyoming between the southern extremes of the Wind River Range and the Antelope Hills, South Pass was a direct route with access to water leading from the Missouri River to the Rockies. Stuart and his traveling party were the first white men to traverse what would become the gateway to the Far West and the Oregon Trail. In the decades to come, an estimated 300,000 emigrants followed the corridor Stuart blazed on their way to the fertile farmlands of the Willamette Valley and the goldfields of California. Across the Great Divide brings to life Stuart's ten-month journey and the remarkable courage, perseverance, and resourcefulness these seven men displayed in overcoming unimaginable hardships. Stuart had come to the Pacific Northwest to make his fortune in the fur trade, but during his stay in the wilderness he emerged as a pioneering western naturalist of the first rank, a perceptive student of Native American cultures, and one of America's most important, if least-known, explorers. Today Stuart's expedition has largely been forgotten, but it ranks as one of the great adventure odysseys of the nineteenth century. A direct descendant of Stuart, award-winning journalist Laton McCartney has obtained unique access to Stuart's letters and diaries from the expedition, lending depth and unparalleled insight to a story that is at once an important account of a pivotal time in American history and a gripping, page-turning adventure.
'Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail' is a book written by Ezra Meeker about his experience traveling the Oregon Trail by ox-drawn wagon as a young man, migrating from Iowa to the Pacific Coast. Later on in his life, Meeker became convinced that the Oregon Trail was being forgotten, and he determined to bring it publicity so it could be marked and monuments erected. In 1906–1908, while in his late 70s, he retraced his steps along the Oregon Trail by wagon, seeking to build monuments in communities along the way. His trek reached New York City, and in Washington, D.C., he met President Theodore Roosevelt. He traveled the Trail again several times in the final two decades of this life, including by oxcart in 1910–1912 and by airplane in 1924.
Uses primary source documents, narrative, and illustrations to recount the history of the Oregon Trail, its role in westward expansion, and the travails of the pioneers who followed it across the West.
An acclaimed historian’s “compellingly told” year-by-year account of the pioneering efforts to conquer the American West in the mid-nineteenth century (The Guardian). In all the sagas of human migration, few can top the drama of the journey by Midwestern farmers to Oregon and California from 1840 to 1849—between the era of the fur trappers and the beginning of the gold rush. Even with mountain men as guides, these pioneers literally plunged into the unknown, braving all manner of danger, including hunger, thirst, disease, and drowning. Employing numerous illustrations and extensive primary sources, including original diaries and memoirs, McLynn underscores the incredible heroism and dangerous folly on the overland trails. His authoritative narrative investigates the events leading up to the opening of the trails, the wagons and animals used, the roles of women, relations with Native Americans, and much else. The climax arrives in McLynn’s expertly re-created tale of the dreadful Donner party, and he closes with Brigham Young and the Mormons beginning communities of their own. Full of high drama, tragedy, and triumph, “rarely has a book so wonderfully brought to life the riveting tales of Americans’ trek to the Pacific” (Publishers Weekly).
