The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck

Author:Rinker Buck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The dramatic river views and rock formations of the West, like Scotts Bluff on the Nebraska-Wyoming line, astonished pioneers who were used to the more predictable geography of the East.

Passed the chimney in the fore part of the day and the formation of the bluffs have a tendency to fill the mind with awe and grandeur. The chimney might pass for one of the foundries in St. Louis, were it blackened by burning stove coal.

As we dropped the wagon down into the broad valley along the North Platte, the purple beacon of the pioneers glowed against the yellow Nebraska sky, and remained within sight for three days. We found a comfortable, fenced pasture for the mules at the old pioneer camp near the rock, slept through another night of violent thunderstorms beneath the escarpments at Scotts Bluff, and then turned the mules toward Mitchell Pass, the route through the Wildcat Hills that the pioneers followed after U.S. Army engineers built a military road in 1851. It was a hot day and the mules labored up the eastern slope of the pass, and our brake pads smoked all the way down the other side.

From the summit of the pass we could see the hazy blue dome of Laramie Peak, more than ninety miles away. There were more rain clouds ahead, and once more we would race the storms to shelter. But nothing rattled me now. Our shakedown with adversity—the endless rains, the endless barbed-wire gates of Nebraska—was behind us, and before us lay a mythic stretch of trail, 350 miles of original ruts through the Wyoming Rockies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.