Author: Donna Wojcik Montgomery
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 630
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Book Description
In 1845 many people gave up homes, farms, family ties, life-time friends, and close neighbors to make a trek of over 2,000 miles in the face of unknown dangers. Why? They had moved to the area around the Mississippi River and its tributaries to find new farmland and to escape slavery, only to find disease that left many chronically ill, floods that swept away years of hard work, and, during the late 1830s and early 1840s, national monetary problems. These people looked westward again, towards Oregon territory, in 1845. Under President James Polk, land was made available to those who would emigrate to and settle in the territory.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Oregon
Languages : en
Pages : 566
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Book Description
Author: Will Bagley
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806147490
Category : California National Historic Trail
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
Between 1841 and 1866, more than 500,000 people followed trails to Oregon, California, and the Salt Lake Valley in one of the greatest mass migrations in American history. This collection of travelers' accounts of their journeys in the 1840s, the first volume in a new series of trail narratives, comprises excerpts from pioneer and missionary letters, diaries, journals, and memoirs-many previously unpublished-accompanied by biographical information and historical background.
Author: Michael L. Tate
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806147482
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
Between 1841 and 1866, more than 500,000 people followed trails to Oregon, California, and the Salt Lake Valley in one of the greatest mass migrations in American history. This collection of travelers’ accounts of their journeys in the 1840s, the first volume in a new series of trail narratives, comprises excerpts from pioneer and missionary letters, diaries, journals, and memoirs—many previously unpublished—accompanied by biographical information and historical background. Beginning with Father Pierre-Jean de Smet’s letters relating his encounters with Plains Indians, and ending with an account of a Mormon gold miner’s journey from California to Salt Lake City, these narratives tell varied and vivid stories. Some travelers fled hard times: religious persecution, the collapse of the agricultural economy, illness, or unpredictable weather. Others looked ahead, attracted by California gold, the verdant Willamette Valley of Oregon, or the prospect of converting Native people to Christianity. Although many welcomed the adventure and adjusted to the rigors of trail life, others complained in their accounts of difficulty adapting. Remembrances of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails have yielded some of the most iconic images in American history. This and forthcoming volumes in The Great Medicine Road series present the pioneer spirit of the original overlanders supported by the rich scholarship of the past century and a half.
Author: Brooks Geer Ragen
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295806869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
In 1845, an estimated 2,500 emigrants left Independence and St. Joseph, Missouri, for the Willamette Valley in what was soon to become the Oregon Territory. It was general knowledge that the route of the Oregon Trail through the Blue Mountains and down the Columbia River to The Dalles was grueling and dangerous. About 1,200 men, women, and children in over two hundred wagons accepted fur trapper and guide Stephen Meek's offer to lead them on a shortcut across the trackless high desert of eastern Oregon. Those who followed Meek experienced a terrible ordeal when his memory of the terrain apparently failed. Lost for weeks with little or no water and a shortage of food, the Overlanders encountered deep dust, alkali lakes, and steep, rocky terrain. Many became ill and some died in the forty days it took to travel from the Snake River in present-day Idaho to the Deschutes River near Bend, Oregon. Stories persist that children in the group found gold nuggets in a small, dry creek bed along the way. From 2006 to 2011, Brooks Ragan and a team of specialists in history, geology, global positioning, metal detecting, and aerial photography spent weeks every spring and summer tracing the Meek Cutoff. They located wagon ruts, gravesites, and other physical evidence from the most difficult part of the trail, from Vale, Oregon, to the upper reaches of the Crooked River and to a location near Redmond where a section of the train reached the Deschutes. The Meek Cutoff moves readers back and forth in time, using surviving journals from members of the 1845 party, detailed day-to-day maps, aerial photographs, and descriptions of the modern-day exploration to document an extraordinary story of the Oregon Trail.
Author: Kenneth L. Holmes
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803272774
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Offers the writings and recollections of thirteen Anglo women who traveled to the American West in the 1840s, taken from their letters and diaries, and reflecting the political, social, and economic forces of the era.
Author: Linda Crew
Publisher: Ooligan Press
ISBN: 1932010262
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Lovisa King, 17, comes of age on the Oregon Trail and finds the strength to help her family survive a deadly shortcut on their journey to the Willamette Valley.
Author: Frank McLynn
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802199143
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 543
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Book Description
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).
Author: Kenneth L. Holmes
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496225546
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
The women who traveled west in covered wagons during the 1840s speak through these letters and diaries. Here are the voices of Tamsen Donner and young Virginia Reed, members of the ill-fated Donner party; Patty Sessions, the Mormon midwife who delivered five babies on the trail between Omaha and Salt Lake City; Rachel Fisher, who buried both her husband and her little girl before reaching Oregon. Still others make themselves heard, starting out from different places and recording details along the way, from the mundane to the soul-shattering and spirit-lifting.
Author: Kenneth L. Holmes
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803273009
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
The stories seem simple?they left, they traveled, they settled?yet the restless westering impulse of Americans created one of the most enduring figures in our frontier pantheon: theøhardy pioneer persevering against all odds. Undeterred by storms, ruthless bandits, towering mountains, and raging epidemics, the women in these volumes suggest why the pioneer represented the highest ideals and aspirations of a young nation. In this concluding volume of the Covered Wagon Women series, we see the final animal-powered overland migrations that were even then yielding to railroad travel and, in a few short years, to the automobile. The diaries and letters resonate with the vigor and spirit that made possible the settling and community-building of the American West.
