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A New American Journey
by Rinker Buck
Book Reviewed by:An 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.
Spanning two thousand miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific coast, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America. In the fifteen years before the Civil War, when 400,000 pioneers used the trail to emigrate West - scholars still regard this as the largest land migration in history - it united the coasts, doubled the size of the country, and laid the groundwork for the railroads. Today, amazingly, the trail is all but forgotten.
Rinker Buck is no stranger to grand adventures. His first travel narrative, Flight of Passage, was hailed by The New Yorker as "a funny, cocky gem of a book," and with The Oregon Trail he brings the most important route in American history back to glorious and vibrant life.
Traveling from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Baker City, Oregon, over the course of four months, Buck was accompanied by three cantankerous mules, his boisterous brother, Nick, and an "incurably filthy" Jack Russell terrier named Olive Oyl. Along the way, they dodge thunderstorms in Nebraska, chase runaway mules across the Wyoming plains, scout more than five hundred miles of nearly vanished trail on foot, cross the Rockies, and make desperate fifty-mile forced marches for water. The Buck brothers repair so many broken wheels and axels that they nearly reinvent the art of wagon travel itself. They also must reckon with the ghost of their father, an eccentric yet loveable dreamer whose memory inspired their journey across the plains and whose premature death, many years earlier, has haunted them both ever since.
But The Oregon Trail is much more than an epic adventure. It is also a lively and essential work of history that shatters the comforting myths about the trail years passed down by generations of Americans. Buck introduces readers to the largely forgotten roles played by trailblazing evangelists, friendly Indian tribes, female pioneers, bumbling US Army cavalrymen, and the scam artists who flocked to the frontier to fleece the overland emigrants. Generous portions of the book are devoted to the history of old and appealing things like the mule and the wagon. We also learn how the trail accelerated American economic development. Most arresting, perhaps, are the stories of the pioneers themselves—ordinary families whose extraordinary courage and sacrifice made this country what it became.
At once a majestic journey across the West, a significant work of history, and a moving personal saga, The Oregon Trail draws readers into the journey of a lifetime. It is a wildly ambitious work of nonfiction from a true American original. It is a book with a heart as big as the country it crosses.
The Oregon Trail
1
I HAD KNOWN LONG BEFORE I rode a covered wagon to Oregon that naïveté was the mother of adventure. I just didn't understand how much of that I really had. Nicholas and I realized before we left Missouri with the mules that we would be the first wagon travelers in more than a century to make an authentic crossing of the Oregon Trail. But that was never the point for us. We pushed mules almost two thousand miles to learn something more important. Even more beautiful than the land that we passed, or the months spent camping on the plains, was learning to live with uncertainty.
The trip was my idea, and I fell into it in my usual barmy way. A few summers ago, while taking an afternoon off from a story I was working on in the Flint Hills of Kansas, I stopped on the road near a stout granite monument that marked a set of wheel ruts disappearing northwest across the plains.
Junction
of
Oregon Trail
with
Overland Trail
60 Rod S-E
Enchanted by the idea that I could ...
Buck is a mildly diverting memoirist, and the chronicle of his personal adventure is not without its moments – though it does suffer from a certain monotony, as only so much narrative momentum can be generated through the recitation of the daily tasks of hitch the mules, steer the wagon, find a campsite, unhitch the mules, cook dinner, sleep under the stars. But his research into the teeming and turbulent existence of the original Oregon Trail pioneers is utterly riveting, from his discussions of how to choose the perfect mule for wagon transport to the ravages of cholera along the trail...continued
Full Review
(1078 words)
(Reviewed by James Broderick).
Bob Drury, coauthor of The Heart of Everything That Is
A master storyteller and dogged reporter, Buck gives substance to an unrelenting wanderlust that is the envy of anyone who has ever dreamed of lighting out for the territories. Eric Jay Dolin, author of Fur, Fortune, and Empire and Leviathan
Once you start reading this book, you will not want to stop. With wonderful writing, colorful characters, and a deep understanding of history and the human condition, Rinker Buck delivers a richly rewarding portrait of the Oregon Trail, past and present. George Howe Colt, National Book Award finalist for The Big House
Part Laura Ingalls Wilder, part Jack Kerouac, The Oregon Trail is an idiosyncratic and irresistible addition to the canon of American road-trip literature. Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder and Americana
As he makes his two thousand-mile pilgrimage by cussed mule across the dusty continent, Rinker Buck finds his way deep into our nation's DNA.One of the defining qualities of the American character has always been restlessness. But even within the traditions of that locomotive impulse, the so-called "Great Migration of 1843" stands out as a singularly significant upheaval in the history of continental relocation – and a central concern of Rinker Buck's The Oregon Trail: An American Journey.
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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. After dispatches from the Oregon territory – from Christian missionaries and fur trappers testifying to the abundant wealth of natural resources and the stirring ...
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by Matthew Klam
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