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The Oregon Trail (Oxford World's Classics)

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Cattle guards were a big problem as the mules wouldn't cross them. Seems they didn't consider blindfolds, blinkers, tarps...?

This book starts out slow. Not too slow - it's the build-up process of the Oregon Trail. I usually don't like all this build up stuff. I wanted to get into the meat of the 1840s and 1850s trek to Oregon by covered wagon. But as I read the story all this build up made sense. Didn't die of dysentry, but nearly died of boredom. As someone who, yes, played that 'Oregon Trail' game, I was so looking forward to this book. Man decides he wants to travel along the Oregon Trail? In an actual wagon pulled by mules? Sure, why not?Alice Nuttall (she/her) is a writer, pet-wrangler and D&D nerd. Her reading has got so out of control that she had to take a job at her local library to avoid bankrupting herself on books - unfortunately, this has just resulted in her TBR pile growing until it resembles Everest. Alice's webcomic, writing and everything else can be found at https://linktr.ee/alicenuttallbooks I had thought this book would be as enjoyable as A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, with both authors challenging themselves to complete two very different historical trails along with their similarly crazy and risk-taking cohorts. I am a walker, so I could somewhat empathize with Bill Bryson, and he's at least entertaining. But... Also interesting content on his family history and the personal dynamics of his relationship with his brother. Rinker does an excellent job in his research of the old Oregon Trail and inserts it in the story as they travel along some of the same ruts/trails that remain today.

If read as a light-hearted memoir instead of a factual nonfiction book, it's not bad. While the brother will be off-putting to some due to his colorful vocabulary, I found his interjections of humor refreshing in what otherwise could be dull at times. His solution was an energizer resorted to by many – a road trip -- but not your normal road trip. He decided to retrace the Oregon Trail – but not in a normal way. He decided to make the journey the way the pioneers did, in a covered wagon pulled by a team of mules.I listened to this on audio, which was vastly entertaining, but I also enjoyed flipping through the print version because it has some great photographs and other illustrations. I would highly recommend this book to those who enjoy amusing travelogues or anyone interested in pioneer history. Nevertheless, they set a record for being the youngest aviators to fly coast-to-coast. Rinker wrote about it in his first book, Flight Passage (1997). When I strike the open plains, something happens. I’m home. I breathe differently. That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea, it’s the grand passion of my life.” – Willa Cather, (epigraph to The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey) Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. It is all told in robust prose, filled with humor and insightful observations about America now and then. The added bonus was how good the people were, across the country, supporting the brothers, on their journey, reminding us how caring and decent, Americans can be.

Crazyass passion is the staple of life and persistence its nourishing force. Without them, you cannot cross the trail.”

The author is long winded. This needs no explanation. I can't imagine a reading audience wants to hear the same story retold 16 times, e.g. some version of: "they said it couldn't be done.... (add 1 hour of reading to detail the full story of how he achieved the impossible)... and I did it. Man, am I great." The Oregon Trail is a smorgasbord of a book. It’s a travel book, it’s a history, and it’s a family saga. While telling an incredible tale of the first covered wagon crossing of the entire Oregon Trail in a century, it chronicles the history and importance of the trail as the highway of history’s largest overland migration. Along the way it fills us in on incidental histories — mule breeding, wagon building, etc. The author also relates his family history — his eccentric father who took his family on covered wagon vacations along the East Coast in the late ‘50s, sparking a lifelong interest that culminated in this journey and book. Pioneering spirit" is a phrase that was used a lot in my family while I was growing up in the 1950s, and it probably explains, too, why I was so drawn to covered wagon travel. I am emotionally connected to my past as a covered wagon traveler — a time when my father was so strapping and young, fun-loving and emotive, a man so wonderful to love. He was a nonconformist in a rigidly conformist age, but I've often felt since then that there was a logic behind his eccentricity.

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