Other editions of book Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail

Ezra Meeker's famous recollections of life in the American wilderness are published here complete with the one hundred and twenty original photographs and illustrations. In his memoir, Ezra Meeker casts his mind back to his early years growing up in Indiana during the 1830s and 1840s. He recalls setting off for Iowa and Oregon along the long and winding Western trail; the Gold Rush, which fueled migration to the farthest reaches of the continent, is remembered with evocative clarity. Meeker recalls the lives and characteristics of the Native American peoples, and the fellow migrants he met on his travels. Meeker pens valuable descriptions of the varied wilderness; the dusty plains, towering mountains, dense forests and barren deserts of America are described with moving vividness. Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail is therefore a retrospective of the United States as it grew in size and influence over almost a century, as well as a depiction of the nation's beauty and vastness.

The Oregon Trail—what suggestion the name carries of the heroic toil of pioneers! Yet a few years' ago the route of the trail was only vaguely known. Then public interest was awakened by the report that one of the very men who had made the trip to Oregon in the old days was traversing the trail once more, moving with ox team and covered wagon from his home in the state of Washington, and marking the old route as he went. The man with the ox team was Ezra Meeker. He went on to the capital, where Mr. Roosevelt, then President, met him with joy.

Out in the state of Washington recently, a veteran of more than ninety years stepped into an aëroplane with the mail pilot and flew from Seattle to Victoria in British Columbia, and back again. The aged pioneer took the trip with all the zest of youth and returned enthusiastic over the adventure. This youthful veteran was Ezra Meeker, of Oregon Trail fame, who throughout his long, courageous, useful life has ever kept in the vanguard of progress. Seventy years ago he became one of the trail-blazers of the Farther West. In 1852, with his young wife and child, he made the hazardous journey over plains and mountains all the way from Iowa to Oregon by ox team. Then, after fifty-four years of struggle in helping to develop the country beyond the Cascades, this undaunted pioneer decided to reblaze the almost lost Oregon Trail.