Booklists: suggested reading

 

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Oregon Trail Stars

 

Fiction and Nonfiction about the Oregon Trail.

 

Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.

Fiction

• Rachel Lemoyne
  Author: Charbonneau, Eileen
  Publisher: Forge $ 22.95 ISBN: 0312864485 Date: 1998
  This powerful new "Women of the West" novel is based on an actual historical incident: the Choctaw Nation's feeding of Ireland's starving people during the Great Famine.
  
• The Oregon Trail
  Author: Compton, Ralph
  Publisher: St Martins $ 6.50 ISBN: 0312955472 Date: 1996
  An extraordinary saga of the trail-blazing cowboys who made their fortune driving cattle from Texas to the Great Frontier. Lou Spencer, Dillard Sumner and their companions found themselves in a hazardous adventure. Among the wagon people there is fighting, killing and stealing. Ahead lay the formidable Rocky Mountains and a band of renegades.
  
• A Sudden Country
  Author: Fisher, Karen
  Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 1400063221 Date: 2005
  PW Kirkus LJ
  A vivid and revelatory novel based on actual events of the 1847 Oregon migration, A Sudden Country follows two characters of remarkable complexity and strength in a journey of survival and redemption. - Publisher Marketing
  Suggested Reading: Western Stars | Debuts | All Stars
  Updated 7.12.05
• The Way West
  Author: Guthrie, Alfred Bertram
  Publisher: Houghton $ 6.95 ISBN: 039507763x Date: 1949
  An enormously entertaining classic, The Way West brings to life the adventure of the western passage and the pioneer spirit. The sequel to The Big Sky, this celebrated novel charts a frontiersman's return to the untamed West in 1846. Dick Summers, as pilot of a wagon train, guides a group of settlers on the difficult journey from Missouri to Oregon. In sensitive but unsentimental prose, Guthrie illuminates the harsh trials and resounding triumphs of pioneer life. With The Way West, he pays homage to the grandeur of the western wilderness, its stark and beautiful scenery, and its extraordinary people.
  
• Desperate Crossing: The Jenny Sanders Pryor Story
  Author: Reife, Barbara
  Publisher: Forge $ 22.95 ISBN: 0312860714 Date: 1997
  Jenny Pryor and her husband are on their way from Kansas to Laramie, Wyoming, when their wagon train is attacked by Sioux Indians. Captured during the brutal assault, Jenny is taken to the Black Hills in South Dakota where Chief Ottawa makes her his reluctant wife. And while Jenny's husband struggles to rescue her, Jenny manages her own daring escape.
  
• Scarlet Thread
  Author: Rivers, Francine
  Publisher: Tyndale $ 13.99 ISBN: 0842335684 Date: 1996
  When Sierra discovers her young ancestor's handcrafted quilt and reads her journal, she finds their lives are very similar. By following her ancestor's example, she learns to surrender to God's sovereignty and unconditional love.
  
• The Blessing Stone
  Author: Wood, Barbara
  Publisher: St Martins $ 25.95 ISBN: 031227534x Date: 2003
  From the #1 internationally bestselling author comes a sweeping epic that chronicles the history of the world through the destiny of a mysterious blue stone.
  Millions of years ago, a meteorite fell to earth and shattered, revealing a beautiful blue stone. One hundred thousand years ago, a girl named Tall One found the crystal on the African plain, and it formed her destiny--as well as the destiny of generations to come. From ancient Israel to Imperial Rome, medieval England to fifteenth-century Germany, the eighteenth-century Caribbean, and the nineteenth-century American West, the destiny of the stone and the history of the world unfold. Each story is full of the betrayals and obsessions of the human heart, and the quests of the human spirit. In The Blessing Stone, Barbara Wood has both told the intimate details of her characters' lives and created a sense of the epic sweep of human history.
  
  

Nonfiction

• Treasures in the Trunk: Quilts of the Oregon Trail
  Author: Cross, Mary Bywater
  Publisher: Rutledge Hill $ 24.95 ISBN: 1558532196 Date: 1993
  PW
  Between 1840 and 1870, a quarter of a million Americans crossed the continent to Oregon and California in what was considered one of the great migrations of modern times...Thousands of women arrived in the Northwest by way of the Oregon Trail. This migration or "leave-taking" would consume the longest time and widest distance for these nineteenth-century women to establish new homes for themselves and their loved ones."
  This beautifully illustrated volume recounts the stories of the women who traveled the Oregon Trail. Includes their reasons for traveling west and the hardships that they encountered. Index and bibliography. - Publisher Marketing.
  
• The Oregon Trail: An American Saga
  Author: Dary, David
  Publisher: Knopf $ 35 ISBN: 0375413995 Date: 2004
  Booklist
  Using diaries, journals, company and expedition reports, and newspaper accounts, the author presents a major one-volume history of the Oregon Trail from its earliest beginnings to present.
  
• The Oregon Trail
  Author: Parkman, Francis
  The Oregon Trail is the gripping account of Francis Parkman's journey west across North America in 1846. After crossing the Allegheny Mountains by coach and continuing by boat and wagon to Westport, Missouri, he set out with three companions on a horseback journey that would ultimately take him over two thousand miles.