Oregon Trail Diaries

In her diary, thirteen-year-old Hattie chronicles her family's arduous 1847 journey from Missouri to Oregon on the Oregon Trail.

An expanded edition of one of the most original and provocative works of American history of the last decade, which documents the pioneering experiences and grit of American frontier women.

"The Oregon Trail Diary of Willa Porter" is a collection of diary entries from Willa Porter's journey west with her family, into territory which gets stranger and stranger. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

In 1848, nine-year-old Joshua Martin McCullough writes a journal of his family's journey from Missouri to Oregon in a covered wagon, in an addition to a popular series which includes a historical note about westward migration. Reprint.

With numbers swelled by Oregon-bound settlers as well as hordes of gold-seekers destined for California, the 1852 overland migration was the largest on record in a year taking a terrible toll in lives mainly due to deadly cholera. Included here are firsthand accounts of this fateful year, including the words and thoughts of a young married couple, Mary Ann and Willis Boatman, released for the first time in book-length form. In its immediacy, Surviving the Oregon Trail, 1852 opens a window to the travails of the overland journeyers--their stark camps, treacherous river fordings, and dishonest countrymen; the shimmering plains and mountain vastnesses; trepidation at crossing ancient Indian lands; and the dark angel of death hovering over the wagon columns. But also found here are acts of valor, compassion, and kindness, and the hope for a new life in a new land at the end of the 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.

Late in 1848, nine-year-old Joshua McCullough starts a second journal, this time recording events in Willamette Valley, Oregon Territory, as his family and others they met on the trail begin to get settled. Simultaneous.

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.

Abigail Jane Scott was seventeen when she left Illinois with her family in the spring of 1852. Her record of the journey west is full of expressive detail: breakfasting in a snowstorm, walking behind the wagons to keep warm, tasting buffalo meat, trying to climb Independence Rock. She meets her future husband, Benjamin Duniway, at the end of the Oregon Trail and, in the years to come, finds fame as a writer and a leader of the suffrage movement in the Northwest. Her grandson, David Duniway, edited her trail diary for Covered Wagon Women. This volume includes the equally vivid diaries of other women who rode the wagons in 1852. Polly Coon of Wisconsin recalls trading with the Indians. Martha Read, starting from Illinois, is particularly alert to the suffering of the animals, noting hundreds of dead cows and horses along the way. Cecilia Adams and Parthenia Blank, twin sisters from Illinois, jointly chronicle their once-in-a-lifetime experience.