the oregon trail a new american journey by rinker buck

The Buck brothers repair so many broken wheels and axels that they nearly reinvent the art of wagon travel itself. 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. 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. 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. Rinker Buck is no stranger to grand adventures. Today, amazingly, the trail is all but forgotten. 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. Spanning two thousand miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific coast, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America. From “a virtuoso storyteller in a very American vein” (Phillip Lopate), The Oregon Trail is 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-which also tells the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country.

The oregon trail a new american journey by rinker buck