Spanning two thousand miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific coast, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America.

This event will occur at the University School of Nashville.Īn epic account of traveling the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way-in a covered wagon with a team of mules, an audacious journey that hasn’t been attempted in a century-which also chronicles the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country. As Buck notes in The Oregon Trail, 'Oregon fever was contagious and soon even families with relatively prosperous farms, and no apparent reason for picking up and leaving, were deciding to sell out and join the adventurous train of white-tops moving west.Parnassus Books welcomes Rinker Buck as he discusses and signs The Oregon Trail. As reports of the wagon train's arrival made their way east, more and more Americans decided to go west. Over the next 25 years, as many as half a million pioneers followed the path of wheel ruts and mule hooves that marked the 2,100-mile trail through the plains, deserts, Rocky Mountains, bluffs and gorges. Approximately 1 in 10 travelers died along the trail as they dealt with the ravages of starvation, accidents and disease.ĭespite the dire consequences faced by those early migrants, interest in westward expansion along the trail spread like wild rye on the prairie. Rinker, whose book recounts his attempts with his brother to cross the Oregon Trail by covered wagon, faced some daunting obstacles in his journey, but nothing compared to what the original settlers in 1843 dealt with. More than 120 wagons and 5,000 cattle set out from Independence, Missouri in early May for the six-month journey. Marcus Whitman, a Methodist minister who was returning to the mission he had established on the Columbia River in the Oregon territory. The 'Great Migration' wagon train was led by Dr. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, a trickle of travelers traversed the nascent trailway, but in 1843, that trickle became a flood, with about 1,000 settlers embarking on a now-fabled wagon train journey that initiated, in the estimation of some historians, one of the greatest mass relocations in American history. After dispatches from the Oregon territory – from Christian missionaries and fur trappers testifying to the abundant wealth of natural resources and the stirring pastoral pulchritude – became more widely publicized, thousands of Easterners caught the fever for westward adventure. Prior to the early 1840s, what today is labeled the Oregon Trail was really more of a set of loosely connected overland routes through Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon.

The oregon trail book by rinker buck