The Oregon Trail was an important part of American history. It helped bring new people to the western United States. Explore what life was like for pioneers on the Oregon Trail, what difficulties they faced along the way, and what it was like to live in Oregon once they arrived. Complete with vivid photographs, a glossary, and colorful designs, this is an excellent way to introduce readers to America’s early westward expansion.

When Calvin Tibbets ventured to Oregon Country in 1832 it was looking more British than American. That's because Hudson's Bay Company, the Crown's proxy, had virtual control of the area and some of their French Canadian employees had retired to farms along the Willamette River. The only Americans there before Tibbets were explorers, fur trappers, scientists, and sailors. His goal was different: to settle Oregon with Americans and make it part of the United States. Tibbets got along with his Canadian neighbors and native tribes long enough to assist fellow American settlers when they arrived: first missionaries, then retiring mountain men, and finally wagon train pioneers who crossed the Oregon Trail in such great numbers that the British finally gave up their claims to Oregon in 1846. Unfortunately, Tibbets died soon after achieving his goal, and all that he had done to achieve it soon faded into the shadows of Oregon history. In making the case for Calvin Tibbets being considered Oregon's first pioneer, this book shines a bright light back on him. New details gleaned from original sources are integrated with previously published, but scattered, accounts of Tibbets' many adventures. Readers will likely learn things they didn't know about John McLoughlin, Jason Lee, Ewing Young, Bethenia Owens-Adair, Elbridge Trask, Joe Meek, Solomon and Celiast Smith, and others who played important roles in early Oregon.

Describes how it was to live as a pioneer on the Oregon Trail.

"'Skookum' is the startlingly original narrative rendering of the experiences of a prominent westering family from 1843 to the present. The remarkable story of the Applegate family encompasses many of the predominant themes of the early American West: the overland crossing via the old Oregon Tail in 1843, the quirky restlessness of Applegate men who, after reaching the 'promised land,' permitted their travel- worn families to rest only for a while, the effects of the intermit- tent gold rushes that continued to upset family lifre long after 1849, the troubled relations between the settler and the Indian ... Shannon Applegate is interested not only in what happemned to her family, but in what it meant to them. How did it feel to be a mother witnessing the death of her child on the way to Oregon, or to be a settler's son watching his Indian friends and old playmates rounded up in the dead of winter and marched off to the reserves? What did it do to the course of a young woman's life when she learned that her father has scratched her name from the family Bible? What sort of world was it where an old blue sugar bowl filled with gold dust could be unconcernedly set out in plain sight?"--From paper dustcover.