"A virtuoso storyteller in a very American vein" (Phillip Lopate), Rinker Buck reads his epic account of traveling the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way - in a covered wagon with a team of mules, an audacious journey that hasn't been attempted in a century - which also tells the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country.Spanning two thousand miles and traversing six states from Missouri to the Pacific coast, the Oregon Trail is the route that made America. In the fifteen years before the Civil War, when 400,000 pioneers used the trail to emigrate West - scholars still regard this as the largest land migration in history - it united the coasts, doubled the size of the country, and laid the groundwork for the railroads.
