The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60

Front Cover
University of Illinois Press, 1993 - History - 565 pages
The most honored book ever released by the University of Illinois Press, The Plains Across was the result of more than a decade's work by its author. Here, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Oregon Trail, is a paperback reissue that includes the notes, bibliography, and illustrations contained in the 1979 cloth edition.
 

Contents

PUBLIC OPINION 184048 Palpable homicide or Merry as a marriage bell?
28
PUBLIC OPINION 184960 Humbugging and Helping
62
MOTIVATIONS AND BEGINNINGS Life as at a fair
90
EMIGRANT INTERACTION Our journey has not been as solitary as we feared
118
EMIGRANTINDIAN INTERACTION From mutual aid to massacres
156
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT Good fellow Uncle Sam is
201
PRIVATE ENTREPRENEURS 184049 While others are chasing wealth they are catching it no dream
244
PRIVATE ENTREPRENEURS 185060 Too many cooks spoil the broth
267
THE MORMON HALFWAY HOUSE It cost nothing to get in but a great deal to get out
302
WEST COAST ASSISTANCE Are you men from California or do you come from Heaven?
338
THE OVERLANDERS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE To endure heat like a salamander and labor like a jackass
379
NOTES
417
BIBLIOGRAPHY
519
INDEX
555
Copyright

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Popular passages

Page 24 - The chief figure of the American West, the figure of the ages, is not the long-haired, fringed-legging man riding a raw-boned pony, but the gaunt and sad-faced woman sitting on the front seat of the wagon, following her lord where he might lead, her face hidden in the same ragged sunbonnet which had crossed the Appalachians and the Missouri long before.
Page 10 - But the picture, in its grandeur, its wonderful mingling of colors and distinctness of detail, is forgotten in contemplation of the singular people who give it life and animation. No other race of men with the means at their command would undertake .so great a journey ; none save these could successfully perform it, with no previous preparation, relying only on the fertility of their invention to devise the means to overcome each danger and difficulty as it arose.

About the author (1993)

The late John D. Unruh, Jr., a descendant of Mennonite pioneers, was born in South Dakota in 1937. He was, until his death in 1976, an associate professor of history at Bluffton College in Ohio.

Bibliographic information