Mile 939: Clayton’s Slough
West of Rock Avenue on the Oregon Trail in what’s now central Wyoming, emigrants came to an odorous, swampy place where their livestock often got stuck in the mud and…
Mile 937: Avenue of Rocks
About nine miles west of Emigrant Gap, the Oregon Trail wound through a narrow gap between two ragged ridges of sandstone and shale rocks, upended strata we now would call…
Mile 927: Emigrant Gap
"This leg of the trip, Emigrant Gap (today sometimes called the Poison Spider Route), was a bitter introduction to what lay ahead: long stretches of hot, hilly trail with little…
Two Can Keep a Secret
"In a great many tales of the same type the "curse" on the treasure is human greed. An old proverb, common among prospectors as well as others, reminds us that…
The Code of the West
"In the absence of law and in the social conditions tha obtained, men worked out an extra-legal code or custom by which they guided their actions. This custom is often…
Semi-Arid and Sub-Humid Climate
"There has been a tendency on the part of writers to mix a good deal of sentiment with their history of the West. Because of the peculiar difficulties to be…
The Great American Desert
"The language of the maps shows that the Great American Desert existed in the records from 1820 until 1858. The popular concept of the desert had existed in the written…
Misnaming Plains Animals
"A further fact worth remembering about the Plains animals is that most of those peculiar to the Plains have been popularly misnamed. The buffalo is the bison, the prairie dog…
Digger Indians
"And here [along the Humbolt River], if you were going to, you encountered the Diggers, their half-gram brains vibrating with the remembered murders of hundreds of kinsmen and with desire…
Suckers and Pukes
"Through the magic of the Internet, we managed to find an 1854 volume called History of Illinois From Its Commencement as a State in 1818 to 1857, penned by "the…
Manifest Destiny
"[I]n 1845, [journalist John] O'Sullivan wrote another essay titled Annexation in the Democratic Review, in which he first used the phrase manifest destiny. In this article he urged the U.S. to annex…
Midwestern Folk Wisdom
"In Adams County, Illinois, the mass of advice directed toward the common problems of women reflected the sympathy women felt for one another. A girl entering her first period will have…
Telling Time by the Sun
"The dominant paradigm of farm life was the cycle: the recurrence of the days and seasons; the process of growth and reproduction. Hand-power technology did not deceive men into thinking they could…
Droppings of the Lesser Redneck
"Interstate 80 swings well south of the emigrant trail through the Truckee Dunes today. Only the hiss of windblown sand disturbs the graveyard quiet now. Jeep tracks follow the trail across…
Period Rush
"As a channel evolves into ever more extreme loops, eventually two separate bends may approach one another and join. When this occurs, the river takes the shortcut and establishes a…