So Rugged and Mountainous; Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California 1812 - 1848

Western Heritage Award Winner for Best Nonfiction Book 2011

The story of America's westward migration is a powerful blend of fact and fable. Over the course of three decades, almost a million eager fortune-hunters, pioneers, and visionaries transformed the face of a continent - and displaced its previous inhabitants. The people who made the long and perilous journey over the Oregon and California trails drove this swift and astonishing change. In this magisterial volume, Will Bagley tells why and how this massive emigration began.

Drawing on research he conducted for the National Park Service's Long Distance Trails Office, Bagley has woven a wealth of primary sources - personal letters and journals, government documents, newspaper reports, and folk accounts - into a compelling narrative that reinterprets the first years of overland migration. He spotlights the crucial years between 1840 and 1848, when American adventurers, explorers, and farmers blazed wagon roads to the Pacific across both the Cascade Range and the Sierra Nevada, making the vainglorious concept of Manifest Destiny into a flesh-and-blood reality.

Illustrated with more than thirty photographs and historical maps, So Rugged and Mountainous is the first of a projected four-volume history, Overland West: The Story of the Oregon and California Trails.

Hardcover, 458 pgs, University of Oklahoma Press

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