Overland West : the story of the Oregon and California trails

Author / Creator

Bagley, Will, 1950-2021

Available as

Physical

Summary

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 ...

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 "Overland West: the story of the Oregon and California Trails," the four volumes of the set tell the sweeping saga of how this 'road across the Plains' transformed the American West and became an enduring part of its legacy. -- from Book Jacket

The first volume, subtitled "So rugged and mountainous: Blazing the trails to Oregon and California, 1812-1848," tells how this massive immigration began. Drawing on extensive research, the author 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. It relates the story of remarkable men, women, and children who first traveled 'the plains across' from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean between 1812 and 1848, and who helped make the United States a continental nation. He folds into the narrative more than five hundred overland sources unknown to earlier scholars. And he particularly spotlights the crucial years between 1840 and 1848, when American adventurers, explorers, and farmers blazed wagon roads to the Pacific across both the Cascade Range and the Sierra Nevada, making the vainglorious concept of Manifest Destiny into flesh-and-blood reality. -- from Book Jacket

The second volume, subtitled 'With golden visions bright before them : trails to the mining West, 1849-1852' captures the danger, excitement, and heartbreak of America's first great rush for riches and its enduring consequences as a quarter of a million travelers followed the 'road across the plains' in the mid-nineteenth century to the gold rush in California. With narrative scope and detail, the book tells this classic American saga through the voices of the people whose eyewitness testimonies vividly evoke the most dramatic era of westward migration. The gold rush epoch witnessed untold suffering and sacrifice, and the trails and their trials were enough to make many people turn back. Drawing from hundreds of previously unpublished diaries, letters, and recollections, the author describes the fortunes and misfortunes of gold-seeking forty-niners, Oregon-bound farmers, and Mormon pilgrims. Also discussed are America's native peoples, for whom the effect of the massive migration was no less than ruinous as thousand of intruders encroached on their ancient homelands. -- from Book Jacket

Show More