Bound for Montana is an abridgement of the prize-winning two volume series, Journeys to the Land of Gold. The abridgement includes diary and journal excerpts from travelers moving overland in the 1860s, bound for Montana.

GOLD! The age-old motivator and one that saw tens of thousands of Americans fueling westward expansion to the Pacific coast. In 1863, John Bozeman pioneered a route that connected Montana gold fields to the Oregon Trail. As the Civil War closed, the flow of emigrants turned into a flood, angering the Native Americans over this intrusion into their nomadic lands. The Lakota chief Red Cloud declared war. Here are the stories of the years when the dangerous Bozeman Trail was in use. From it's first wagon train to the closing of the forts that protected the route, some of the most storied pioneers of the west played a part. The legendary Jim Bridger and the Fetterman Fight are just part of the adventure. Every memoir of the American West provides us with another view of the migration that changed the country forever.

A history of the Bozeman Trail, which led to the goldfields of Montana, begins with the creation of the Trail in 1862 and follows the events of 1863 through 1868, during which it was followed by prospectors seeking their fortunes, as well as the gamblers, highwaymen, "professional women", and merchants who sought to capitalize on the miner's needs and vices; facing hostile Indians, hard climates, and wilderness solitude along the way.

Collected here for the first time ever are the surviving eyewitness accounts of the Bozeman's Trail's civilian emigrants: twenty-four diaries written during the journey and nine reminiscences prepared afterward. These accounts describe life on the West's last great emigrant trail, the shortcut from the Platte River Road to the Montana goldfields, from 1863 until 1866, when the route was closed by "Red Cloud's War." Ample introductions, extensive annotation, historical illustrations, and detailed maps enrich this oversized, two-volume compendium.