Seeing the Elephant: The Many Voices of the Oregon Trail

Front Cover
Texas Tech University Press, 2003 - 260 pages
"The target audience for this book is middle and high school students. However, its information will appeals to a far broader audience. . . . .A useful introduction to trail travel and associated incidents."--Journal of the West "[A] little gem of a book."--Overland Journal Theirs has been called America's single largest voluntary, historical migration. From the late 1830's to the mid-1870's--a span of just over forty years--nearly half a million ordinary folk left farms and families, friends, and all that was familiar and turned their faces west to Oregon, to California, to the valley of the Great Salt Lake, and to the gold fields of Montana. All "saw the elephant" along the Oregon Trail. Whether viewed from the perspective of Manifest Destiny or through the vision-dreams of tribal elders, this mass overland migration to the "Land of Milk and Honey" forever changed our nation and forever altered the way Americans saw themselves. The clash of cultures and beliefs that followed left its mark upon the American spirit as indelibly as the Oregon Trail rutted the land over which it crossed. Seeing the Elephant lets the people of the Trail speak for themselves and their times. Drawn from first-hand accounts in diaries, journals, and letters and interpreted by the author of the much acclaimed Sacagawea Speaks, their voices ring true. From Narcissa Whitman, who made an amazing trek into the unknown in 1836, through Lucy Alice Ide, who proclaimed her own modern passage in 1878, each voice of Seeing the Elephant is infused with character and instruction--and the immediacy that comes only from living history. Seeing the Elephant leaps from our nation's historic archives into the imagination. Timelines, maps, photographs, and historical illustrations enable readers young and old to trace Trail migration chronologically and geographically.
 

Contents

Wagon Train ByLaws 1849
6
Perkins Wagon Train 1864
7
OUTFITTING FOR OREGON
9
Emiggrants Guide to California 1849
11
The Prairie Traveler Handbook for Overland Travelers 1859
13
Ox Team Days on the Oregon Trail
15
The Voices
17
HISTORY AND INTERPRETATION
19
Where Many Fond Hopes Have Been Laid
130
LETS INTERPRET
148
The Trail Was a Battlefield
154
LETS INTERPRET
170
Oh Dear Oh Dear This Is Going to Oregon
177
LETS INTERPRET
191
Army Indian Fighter on the Overland Trail
197
LETS INTERPRET
212

Into the Unknown
21
LETS INTERPRET
39
Go West Young Man
48
LETS INTERPRET
72
A Boys Grand Adventure
80
LETS INTERPRET
103
Oregon Trail Orphan
110
LETS INTERPRET
123
Trails EndThus We All Are Scattered
218
LETS INTERPRET
232
SUMMARY
239
Historical Photographs and Artifacts
243
BIBLIOGRAPHY
253
INDEX
257
Copyright

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