Surviving the Oregon Trail, 1852
Surviving the Oregon Trail, 1852

Author: Weldon Willis Rau

Publisher: Washington State University Press

Published: 2021-08-03

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1636820646

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With numbers swelled by Oregon-bound settlers as well as hordes of gold-seekers destined for California, the 1852 overland migration was the largest on record in a year taking a terrible toll in lives mainly due to deadly cholera. Included here are firsthand accounts of this fateful year, including the words and thoughts of a young married couple, Mary Ann and Willis Boatman, released for the first time in book-length form. In its immediacy, Surviving the Oregon Trail, 1852 opens a window to the travails of the overland journeyers--their stark camps, treacherous river fordings, and dishonest countrymen; the shimmering plains and mountain vastnesses; trepidation at crossing ancient Indian lands; and the dark angel of death hovering over the wagon columns. But also found here are acts of valor, compassion, and kindness, and the hope for a new life in a new land at the end of the trail.

Big Trouble
Big Trouble

Author: J. Anthony Lukas

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-07-17

Total Pages: 884

ISBN-13: 1439128103

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Hailed as "toweringly important" (Baltimore Sun), "a work of scrupulous and significant reportage" (E. L. Doctorow), and "an unforgettable historical drama" (Chicago Sun-Times), Big Trouble brings to life the astonishing case that ultimately engaged President Theodore Roosevelt, Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the politics and passions of an entire nation at century's turn. After Idaho's former governor is blown up by a bomb at his garden gate at Christmastime 1905, America's most celebrated detective, Pinkerton James McParland, takes over the investigation. His daringly executed plan to kidnap the radical union leader "Big Bill" Haywood from Colorado to stand trial in Idaho sets the stage for a memorable courtroom confrontation between the flamboyant prosecutor, progressive senator William Borah, and the young defender of the dispossessed, Clarence Darrow. Big Trouble captures the tumultuous first decade of the twentieth century, when capital and labor, particularly in the raw, acquisitive West, were pitted against each other in something close to class war. Lukas paints a vivid portrait of a time and place in which actress Ethel Barrymore, baseball phenom Walter Johnson, and editor William Allen White jostled with railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, socialist Eugene V. Debs, gunslinger Charlie Siringo, and Operative 21, the intrepid Pinkerton agent who infiltrated Darrow's defense team. This is a grand narrative of the United States as it charged, full of hope and trepidation, into the twentieth century.