In this classic Western travelog, the author leaves his native Boston for an unforgettable journey across the disappearing American frontier. In the spring of 1846, Francis Parkman, headed west to experience the untamed regions of America, to acquaint himself with the wild mountain men in the Rockies, and to visit the surviving Indian tribes before all were absorbed by the relentless advance of Western civilization. The Harvard-educated aristocrat had been preparing for this expedition his entire life, learning to ride and shoot better than anyone else in New England. The California and Oregon Trail is Parkman?s thrilling account of a summer spent journeying from St. Louis through the Great Plains and Black Hills to the Rockies. Traveling with his guide, Henry Chatillon, Parkman comes to revere the French trappers and voyageurs who had originally opened the country while mastering an essential art of frontier survival: hunting buffalo. Though plagued by a mysterious illness since childhood that left him weak and blind for long periods of time, Parkman was the picture of perseverance, eagerly covering vast stretches of the Great Plains with a roving band of Sioux for days on end. He returned home exhausted and almost entirely blind. Yet by dictating his incredible stories, they have become an immortal classic of Western literature.
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