Trails West Author:Marc Simmons, Wallace Stegner, Charles McCarry, Robert Lazalt, Don Dedera, Louis De La Haba "As long as new country with new hope lay between the settled Missouri and the beckoning Pacific, Americans were going to cross it." Thus Wallace Stegner, one of the six authors of Trails West, sums up the spirit that created the Oregon Trail and the other emigrant roads. — The reasons for heading to the "lands beyond sund... more »own" were as varied as the men and women the West attracted. Sheer adventure drew some; the promise of fertile land or hope for religious freedom impelled others. Very often the motive was gold fever or expectation of profitable trade -- what Ralph Waldo Emerson termed "a very commonplace wish to find a short way to wealth."
In these pages you will sense the excitement rippling through a caravan setting out from Independence, Missouri, for distant, foreign Santa Fe. You will stand in ruts worn deep in sandstone by iron-clad wheels endlessly turning toward Oregon or California. You will trudge with tireless Mormons, sternly disiplined in their religious zeal, to their promised land. America's westering emigrants experienced suffering and hardship almost too great to endure: the "wordless hours ... people too weary even to speak"; dry alkaline flats so dazzling white that one forty-niner envisioned "Salt, fire and ... Brimstone."
To open the southernmost route to California, soldiers hacked away at walls of solid rock. Many who attempted to cross the continent paid with their lives. Accidents and disease decimated wagon trains. Hostile Indians were a continuing threat on the Gila and Bozeman Trails. And weather, always unpredictable, took a grim toll.
The book contains more than 130 color photographs, many evoking the wilderness that greeted early settlers. Fifty-nine historical illustrations provide a vivid picture of frontier life. The authors delved into journals and letters to see, through the eyes of men and women who were there, the joys and pain of the journey. And both writers and photographers joined wagon-train reenactments to travel back themselves "into the time where our fathers are ... on that old, rough trail."« less