America's Historic Trails: With Tom Bodett - Softcover

Pierce, J. Kingston; Bodett, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0912333006 ISBN 13: 9780912333007

Publisher: Bay Books, 1997

Synopsis

Featuring maps and travel information, an illustrated companion book to the thirteen-part public television series leads travelers and history buffs along ten extant wilderness trails and wagon roads that helped shape American history. Original. TV tie-in. 25,000 first printing. IP.

About this title

From the Author

Follow trails and people who expanded America's boundaries.
Authorities who speak of the propensity in our modern societyfor people to move from place to place, to be always in search of a better life somewhere else--in the next suburb, the next city, the next state--could just as easily be summing up American behavior of a century or two ago. The pace of our itinerancy has quickened; our desire to go has not changed. After more than 200 years as a settled nation, we are still not a settled people.

There's nothing wrong with that. It is the need to claim a farther land that shoved the boundaries of early America westward to meet the French colonists along the Mississippi River and, later, Spanish pioneers in California and New Mexico. Without that need, there would have been no Great Wagon Road, no Wilderness Road, no Mormon Trail or California Trail. The United States would today be a smaller place and a place of smaller ambitions. This book looks back at 10 of the most memorable paths along which explorers and immigrants traveled in their opening of what's now the United States. But it is also a fond recollection of many of the people most instrumental in leading the national expansion. Some of those characters are familiar and well respected--President Andrew Jackson, for instance, who as a young man was a frequent traveler over Mississippi's notorious Natchez Trace; or Benjamin Franklin, who championed New England's Post Road; or Brigham Young, the Vermont farmer who convinced thousands of Mormons to leave the Midwest and settle in the sere landscape of northern Utah. Other important parties have been pretty much forgotten--either intentionally or not--among them George Donner, whose wagon train met with tragedy in California's Sierra Nevadas in the mid-1840s; and Erastus Brainerd, the Seattle newspaper editor who did such a good job of promoting the Klondike gold rush, that he, himself, set off north in the spring of 1898.

History-minded travelers should find in this book both information and delight...as well as some ideas of where their unsettled natures might take them next ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Bay Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0912333006
• ISBN 13: 9780912333007
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 260