Nonfiction · 1849
The Oregon Trail
Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life
A young Boston lawyer sets out in 1846 on a strenuous journey along the emigrant trail toward the Rocky Mountains, riding among fur traders, army dragoons, and a band of Sioux warriors preparing for battle, in an account written while the West he describes — still largely unmapped by white Americans — remained a living, ungoverned frontier rather than a memory.
Francis Parkman published The Oregon Trail in 1849, drawn directly from the journals of his own 1846 expedition; the journey permanently damaged his health but launched the career of one of America's foremost historians of the colonial and frontier era.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.
Contents
- Chapter I — The Frontier
- Chapter II — Breaking the Ice
- Chapter III — Fort Leavenworth
- Chapter IV — “Jumping Off”
- Chapter V — “The Big Blue”
- Chapter VI — The Platte and the Desert
- Chapter VII — The Buffalo
- Chapter VIII — Taking French Leave
- Chapter IX — Scenes at Fort Laramie
- Chapter X — The War Parties
- Chapter XI — Scenes at the Camp
- Chapter XII — Ill Luck
- Chapter XIII — Hunting Indians
- Chapter XIV — The Ogallalla Village
- Chapter XV — The Hunting Camp
- Chapter XVI — The Trappers
- Chapter XVII — The Black Hills
- Chapter XVIII — A Mountain Hunt
- Chapter XIX — Passage of the Mountains
- Chapter XX — The Lonely Journey
- Chapter XXI — The Pueblo and Bent’s Fort
- Chapter XXII — Tete Rouge, the Volunteer
- Chapter XXIII — Indian Alarms
- Chapter XXIV — The Chase
- Chapter XXV — The Buffalo Camp
- Chapter XXVI — Down the Arkansas
- Chapter XXVII — The Settlements
New editions
Never lose your place.
This book is free to read in full, and stays that way. Leave an address: one click confirms it and opens a free account, so your progress and bookmarks sync across every device. You'll also hear when the next restored edition enters the archive. Terminate at any time.
Subjects
About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Source mind
About the author
1823–1893 · Victorian
Francis Parkman (1823–1893) was born in Boston to a prominent New England family and became one of the foremost American historians of his generation, devoting most of his working life to France and England in North America, a seven-volume history of the colonial struggle for the continent completed over four decades. The Oregon Trail (1849), his first and most popular book, grew out of a strenuous 1846 journey along the westward trail that permanently damaged his already fragile health, leaving him for years nearly blind and unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time; he dictated much of his later work and had assistants read sources aloud to him. He was also an internationally regarded horticulturist and briefly held a professorship of horticulture at Harvard. He died at his home in Jamaica Plain, Boston, at seventy.
Adjacent records
