??arder than baked clay, the Oregon Trail is getting well-trod this
publishing season, this being the third trek westward so far (cf.
Moody, The Old Trails of the West, p. 827, and Webb, The Gold Rush
Trail and the Road to Oregon, p. 832). Mr. Lavender's?? hike has
the distinction of being the best-written and of having a generally
larger philosophical concern. His book is intended as a detailed
witnessing of the doctrine of manifest destiny at work. However, he
leaves off with the California Gold?? Rush, which is where Moody
and Webb begin to be most colorful. Mr. Lavender occupies himself
with accounts of early explorations by priests, by La Salle and the
Harver-Rogers?? team; studies of Indians along the upper Missouri;
voyages of discovery ??ong the Northwest coast; explorations across
Canada and by Spaniards on the Missouri; the Lewis and Clark
expedition; the opening of the Rocky Mountain fur trade and the
British-American fur trade conflict; journeys to the Columbia River
by amateurs and would-be colonists; activities of the missionaries;
and the great emigrations of 1839-40, 1843 and 1844. Then gold
became the motivation, with its discovery at ??utter's Mill, and
manifest destiny an ineluctable fact. Mr. Lavender spells out ??the
westward vision with occasional rich phrases and absorbed attention
to the varieties?? of courage with which the travellers faced
discouraging obstacles. (Kirkus Reviews)
"In one very real sense," David Lavender writes, "the story of the
Oregon Trail begins with Columbus." This opening suggests the
panoramic sweep of his history of that famous trail. In chiseled,
colorful prose, Lavender illustrates the "westward vision" that
impelled the early explorers of the American interior looking for a
northwest passage and send fur trappers into the region charted by
Lewis and Clark. For the emigrants following the trappers' routes,
that vision gradually grew into a sense of a manifest American
destiny. Lavender describes the efforts of emigration societies, of
missionaries like Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, and of early pioneer
settlers like Hall Jackson Kelley, Jason Lee, and Thomas Jefferson
Farnham, as well as the routes they took to the "Promised Land." He
concludes by recounting the first large-scale emigrations of
1843-45, which steeled the U. S. government for war with Mexico and
agreements with Britain over the Oregon boundary.
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