The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life (also published as The California & Oregon Trail) is a book written by Francis Parkman

Francis Parkman

Francis Parkman was an American historian, best known as author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and his monumental seven-volume France and England in North America. These works are still valued as history and especially as literature, although the biases of his...

. It was originally serialized in twenty-one installments in Knickerbocker's Magazine

The Knickerbocker

The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, was a literary magazine of New York City, founded by Charles Fenno Hoffman in 1833, and published until 1865 under various titles, including:...

(1847–49) and subsequently published as a book in 1849.

The book is a breezy, first-person account of a 2 month summer tour in 1846 of the U.S. state

U.S. state

A U.S. state is any one of the 50 federated states of the United States of America that share sovereignty with the federal government. Because of this shared sovereignty, an American is a citizen both of the federal entity and of his or her state of domicile. Four states use the official title of...

s of Nebraska

Nebraska

Nebraska is a state on the Great Plains of the Midwestern United States. The state's capital is Lincoln and its largest city is Omaha, on the Missouri River....

, Wyoming

Wyoming

Wyoming is a state in the mountain region of the Western United States. The western two thirds of the state is covered mostly with the mountain ranges and rangelands in the foothills of the Eastern Rocky Mountains, while the eastern third of the state is high elevation prairie known as the High...

, Colorado

Colorado

Colorado is a U.S. state that encompasses much of the Rocky Mountains as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains...

, and Kansas

Kansas

Kansas is a US state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south...

. Parkman was 23 at the time. The heart of the book covers the three weeks Parkman spent hunting buffalo

American Bison

The American bison , also commonly known as the American buffalo, is a North American species of bison that once roamed the grasslands of North America in massive herds...

 with a band of Oglala Sioux. The book was reviewed favorably by Herman Melville

Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....

, although he complains that it demeaned American Indians and that its title was misleading (the book covers only the first third of the trail).

External links

• The Oregon Trail, HTML, including artwork from 3 different editions/artists.
• The Oregon Trail, scanned books original editions color illustrated.
  • Notable editions from Internet Archive:
  • The Oregon Trail of Francis Parkman, Ginn and Company, 1910. Lengthy introduction, bibliography and footnotes by William Ellery Leonard
    William Ellery Leonard
    William Ellery Leonard was an American poet, playwright, translator, and literary scholar.-Early life:...
    
     with assistance by Frederick Jackson Turner
    Frederick Jackson Turner
    Frederick Jackson Turner was an American historian in the early 20th century. He is best known for his essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", whose ideas are referred to as the Frontier Thesis. He is also known for his theories of geographical sectionalism...
    
    .
  • The Oregon Trail; Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life, Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1911. Includes introduction by American historian William Macdonald
    William Macdonald (historian)
    William Macdonald was an American historian and journalist.William Macdonald was from Providence, Rhode Island. He attended Harvard University where he received a Bachelors of Arts in 1892. In 1895 he received an honorary Doctorate from Union College...