Seven Months to Oregon: 1853
Harold J. Peters
443 pp., 51 illustrations (maps, photos,
charts), Foreword by Mark O. Hatfield, Bibliography, Index
A remarkable new book of diary and reminiscent
accounts of several missionary families who traveled from Upstate
New York to Oregon. Gustavus Hines, two of his brothers, their
families, and trail companions wrote extensively of the trip. They
traveled by horseback, overland stage, and train to the Ohio and
Mississippi Rivers, steamboats to Westport, and by covered wagons on
the well-beaten Oregon Trail. Remarkably literate journalists, they
wrote almost nightly, and although they traveled together their
accounts are surprisingly diverse. The oldest brother drowned while
fording the Snake River west of Fort Boise. A fourth brother applied
for missionary service too late to accompany the overlanders and
traveled to the Willamette Valley by sea, crossing to the Pacific
Ocean over the Isthmus of Panama.
John Mack Faragher, author of Women and Men
on the Overland Trails, wrote this about the new book: “Bringing
together several firsthand accounts of a family’s overland migration
in 1853, Peters vividly recaptures the excitement, the drudgery, the
hope, and the heartbreak of ordinary people in extraordinary times.”
This book is a must for those who love the history of the Oregon
Trail.
Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 1-880397-66-8
Paperback, $24.95, ISBN 1-880397-65-X
