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Robert Stuart saw the American West a few years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and, like them, kept a journal of his epic experience. A partner in John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company, the Scotsman shipped for Oregon aboard the Tonquin in 1810 and helped found the ill-fated settlement of Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River. In 1812, facing disaster, Stuart and six others slipped away from Astoria and headed east. His journal, edited and annotated by Philip Ashton Rollins, describes their hazardous 3,700-mile journey to St. Louis. Crossing the Rockies in winter, they faced death by cold, starvation, and hostile Indians. But they made history by discovering what came to be called the Oregon Trail, including South Pass, over which thousands of emigrants would travel west in mid-century. Besides Stuart’s narrative, this volume contains important material about Astoria and the fate of the Tonquin, as well as the harrowing account of Wilson Price Hunt, who headed a party of overlanders traveling east to join the Astorians.
In Two Volumes. Volume 1, 1819-1853. Volume 2, 1854-1864.
When Lewis and Clark struggled across the high Rockies in Montana and Idaho, their route was too perilous for wagon trains to follow. Six years later, on the return trip from establishing John Jacob Astor's fur trading post at Astoria, Robert Stuart and six companions traveled from west to east for more than 3,000 grueling miles by canoe, horseback, and foot, following the mountains south until they came upon the one gap in the Rocky Mountain chain that was passable by wagon. Resurrecting a pivotal moment in American history, this is the never-before-told story of the young Scottish fur trader who made the trailblazing discovery of the Oregon Trail and changed the face of the country forever. Book jacket.
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