An Eye for History
An Eye for History

Author: Dean Knudsen

Publisher:

Published: 2003-12

Total Pages: 89

ISBN-13: 9780756737160

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The Oregon Trail Museum is located at Scotts Bluff National Monument in Gering, NE. The monument consists of 3,000 acres of prairie and scenic sandstone bluffs, and is dedicated to preserving the legacy of America1s westward movement. This book includes color reproductions of paintings by William Henry Jackson in the museum1s collection. Jackson was a Union soldier in the Civil War, bullwhacker on the Oregon Trial, explorer, photographer and artist for the famous Hayden Surveys of the Territories in the 1870s, author, publisher, world traveler, and businessman. After retiring in 1920, he spent over 20 years in the scenes of his young manhood in the West, sketching, photographing, writing, identifying historic sites, writing and illustrating books, and more.

William Henry Jackson's Lens
William Henry Jackson's Lens

Author: Tim McNeese

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-06-15

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1493064746

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William Henry Jackson was an explorer, photographer, and artist. He is also one of those most often overlooked figures of the American West. His larger claim to fame involves his repeated forays into the western lands of nineteenth-century America as a photographer. Jackson’s life spanned multiple incarnations of the American West. In a sense, he played a singular role in revealing the West to eastern Americans. While others opened the frontier with the axe and the rifle, Jackson did so with his collection of cameras. He dispelled the geological myths through a lens no one could deny or match. His wet plate collodion prints not only helped to reframe the nation’s image of the West, but they also enticed businessmen, investors, scientists, and even tourists to venture into the western regions of the United States. Prior to Jackson’s widely circulated photographs, the American West was little understood and unmapped—mysterious lands that required a camera and a cameraman to reveal their secrets and, ultimately, provide the first photographic record of such exotic destinations as Yellowstone, Mesa Verde, and the Rocky Mountains. Jackson’s story was long and his life full, as he lived to the enviable age of 99. This biography presents the good, bad, and ugly of Jackson’s life, both personal and professional, through the use primary source materials, including Jackson’s autobiographies, letters, and government reports on the Hayden Surveys.

The Oregon Trail
The Oregon Trail

Author: David Dary

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0307429113

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A major one-volume history of the Oregon Trail from its earliest beginnings to the present, by a prize-winning historian of the American West. Starting with an overview of Oregon Country in the early 1800s, a vast area then the object of international rivalry among Spain, Britain, Russia, and the United States, David Dary gives us the whole sweeping story of those who came to explore, to exploit, and, finally, to settle there. Using diaries, journals, company and expedition reports, and newspaper accounts, David Dary takes us inside the experience of the continuing waves of people who traveled the Oregon Trail or took its cutoffs to Utah, Nevada, Montana, Idaho, and California. He introduces us to the fur traders who set up the first “forts” as centers to ply their trade; the missionaries bent on converting the Indians to Christianity; the mountain men and voyageurs who settled down at last in the fertile Willamette Valley; the farmers and their families propelled west by economic bad times in the East; and, of course, the gold-seekers, Pony Express riders, journalists, artists, and entrepreneurs who all added their unique presence to the land they traversed. We meet well-known figures–John Jacob Astor, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, John Frémont, the Donners, and Red Cloud, among others–as well as dozens of little-known men, women, and children who jotted down what they were seeing and feeling in journals, letters, or perhaps even on a rock or a gravestone. Throughout, Dary keeps us informed of developments in the East and their influence on events in the West, among them the building of the transcontinental railroad and the efforts of the far western settlements to become U.S. territories and eventually states. Above all, The Oregon Trail offers a panoramic look at the romance, colorful stories, hardships, and joys of the pioneers who made up this tremendous and historic migration.

The Oregon Trail
The Oregon Trail

Author: Rinker Buck

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-06-30

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 1451659180

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • #1 Indie Next Pick • Winner of the PEN New England Award “Enchanting…A book filled with so much love…Long before Oregon, Rinker Buck has convinced us that the best way to see America is from the seat of a covered wagon.” —The Wall Street Journal “Amazing…A real nonfiction thriller.” —Ian Frazier, The New York Review of Books “Absorbing…Winning…The many layers in The Oregon Trail are linked by Mr. Buck’s voice, which is alert and unpretentious in a manner that put me in mind of Bill Bryson’s comic tone in A Walk in the Woods.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times A major bestseller that has been hailed as a “quintessential American story” (Christian Science Monitor), Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail is an epic account of traveling the 2,000-mile length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way—in a covered wagon with a team of mules—that has captivated readers, critics, and booksellers from coast to coast. Simultaneously a majestic journey across the West, a significant work of history, and a moving personal saga, Buck’s chronicle is a “laugh-out-loud masterpiece” (Willamette Week) that “so ensnares the emotions it becomes a tear-jerker at its close” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis) and “will leave you daydreaming and hungry to see this land” (The Boston Globe).

The Great Medicine Road, Part 4
The Great Medicine Road, Part 4

Author: Michael L. Tate

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2020-05-07

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0806166991

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Between 1841 and 1866, more than a half-million people followed trails to Oregon, California, and Utah in one of the largest mass migrations in American history. The Great Medicine Road, Part 4 collects the letters, diaries, and reminiscences of some of the emigrants who made this journey between 1856 and 1869, as a second generation of miners, farmers, town builders, and religious believers turned their adventurous eyes westward in search of new beginnings. Here, in their own words, are the experiences of young men hoping to make their fortunes in mining operations that had sprung up as the gold rush wore down, in California but also now in the silver mines of Nevada’s Comstock Lode and the recently discovered gold mines of Colorado’s Denver and Pike’s Peak regions. Here also are families and farmers looking for land in the fertile Willamette Valley of Oregon, or joining the Mormon community in Utah. And here are the stories of intrepid sojourners traveling with—or without—military escorts as the Civil War, conflicts with Indians, and the Mormon stand against the U.S. government altered the circumstances of westward traffic. These documents, with an introduction and editorial notes written by historian Michael L. Tate to provide context and commentary, comprise the fourth and final installment in a documentary history of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails. They give a living voice to the history of the American experience at a time of westward expansion and profound, unprecedented change.