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Describes the experiences of families heading west across prairies, mountains, and dangerous rivers to start a new life from the 1850s to the mid-1860s.
Published in 1845, this guidebook for pioneers is a reproduction of one of the most collectible books about California and the Western movement. It was the guidebook used by the Donner Party on their fateful journey. In addition, because Hastings' shortcut route through the Rockies produced such tragedy, the War Department commissioned The Prairie Traveler.
In 1841 and 1842 small groups of emigrants tried to discover a route to California passable by wagons. Without reliable maps or guides, they pushed ahead, retreated, detoured, split up, and regrouped, reaching their destination only at great cost of property and life. But they had found a trail, or cleared one, and by their mistakes had shown others how to take wagon trains across half a continent. By 1844 a great migration was in progress. Each successive party learned from those who went before where to cross rivers and mountains, when to rest, when to forge ahead, and how to find food and water. Increased experience was translated into better wagon designs, improved understanding of climate and terrain, and better-supplied and -organized caravans. George R. Stewart's California Trail describes the trail's year-by-year changes as weather conditions, new exploration, and the changing character of emigrants affected it. Successes and disasters (like the Donner party's fate) are presented in nearly personal detail. More than a history of the trail, this book tells how to travel it, what it felt like, what was feared and hoped for.
Presenting the “lost” year of the overland emigrants in 1848, this volume sheds light on the journey of the men, women, children, and the wagon trains that made the challenging trek from Missouri to Oregon and California. These primary sources, written by seven men and women diarists from different wagon companies, tell how settlers endured the tribulations of a five-month westward journey covering 2,000 miles. These intrepid souls include a young mother, a French priest, a college-educated teacher, and an ox driver. Subjected to the extremes of fear, failure, suffering, and hope, they persevered and finally triumphed.
It has been over 150 years since pioneers first went west from Missouri, across Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Nevada into California, across the vast plains, formidable mountains, and desert. Although the route known as the California Emigrant Trail is mostly unmarked today, much evidence remains. Photographer Greg MacGregor has researched the trail and traveled it for thousands of miles. He has photographed the eroded ruts, emigrant graves, pieces of burned and abandoned wagons. He has also photographed what has sprung up over the trail: KOA campgrounds, golf courses, housing developments. The images are poignant, sometimes amusing, occasionally downright terrifying, and always fascinating in what they reveal about pioneer overland travel. Showing these photographs with excerpts from emigrants' diaries and advice from nineteenth-century guidebooks, Greg MacGregor presents us with a vivid and intimate picture of what the journey was like for those with no idea of what lay ahead. At the same time he captures the ironies in the landscape of the late-twentieth-century West.
In her diary, thirteen-year-old Hattie chronicles her family's arduous 1847 journey from Missouri to Oregon on the Oregon Trail.
"Bruff's Wake tells the story of forty-niners who survived hardship with resolve and endurance. The accompanying illustrations, which include a number of Bruff's sketches paired with modern photographs taken at the same sites, give vivid depictions of life and death on the California Trail in 1849. In addition, Bruff's route is correlated to the geography of the modern era, so that the trail can be traced on modern maps. Taken together, the narrative, sketches, photographs, and geological descriptions of the terrain, coupled with generous quotes from Bruff's long-out-of-print journal, allow the reader to follow in Bruff's wake" -- Publisher's description, p. [4] of cover.
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.
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 dramatic journeys of the 19th century Gold Rush come to life in this geologist’s tour of the American West and the events that shaped the land. In 1848, news of the discovery of gold in California triggered an enormous wave of emigration toward the Pacific. The dramatic terrain these settlers crossed is so familiar to us now that it is hard to imagine how frightening—even godforsaken—its sheer rock faces and barren deserts once seemed to them. Hard Road West brings their perspective vividly to life, weaving together the epic overland journey of the covered wagon trains and the compelling story of the landscape they encountered. Taking readers along the 2,000-mile California Trail, Keith Meldahl uses settler’s diaries and letters—as well as his own experiences on the trail—to reveal how the geology and geography of the West shaped our nation’s westward expansion. He guides us through a landscape of sawtooth mountains, following the meager streams that served as lifelines through an arid land, all the way to California itself, where colliding tectonic plates created breathtaking scenery and planted the gold that lured travelers west in the first place. “Alternates seamlessly between vivid accounts of the 19th-century journey and lucid explanations of the geological events that shaped the landscape traveled.”—Library Journal