He is not afraid to show the reader his flaws-and when he and his brother finally reach Baker City, Ore., he does not pretend to be a changed man. Going up and down steep mountain passes with poor braking was risky, but Nick’s driving skills spared the pair from any disasters.īuck weaves his not-always pretty personal story into the history of the trail, and the trip, and the combination buoys this book. There was no knowing what was around the next bend. We get a sense of the hardships suffered by the settlers because the Bucks experienced a few themselves during their summer sojourn, including bad storms, the daily feeding and care of the mules, wagon breakdowns in the middle of nowhere and getting lost.

The original trek was arduous and dangerous, of course, what with mountain and river crossings, bad weather and disease. Rinker usually slept in the wagon or on the ground while Nick bunked in barns (with owner permission). Except for two bad spots of suburban sprawl around Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and Boise, Idaho, most of the trail is still accessible along remote farm and ranch roads.” And that’s the way the brothers trundled through the West. Buck extensively researched the history of the Oregon Trail, which, he writes, was “originally called the Platte River Road and was a main fur-trapping route to the Rockies that passed through the Arapaho & Sioux tribal lands in western Nebraska.” It wasn’t just one distinct route but veered off in different directions, depending on the destination of the homesteaders, becoming, for example, the California Trail for those wishing to head south and toward the coast.Īccording to Buck, “almost the entire 2,100-mile expanse of the Oregon Trail-even where it has been covered over by modern highways or railroad tracks-has been meticulously charted and marked, with long, undeveloped stretches now preserved as a National Historic Trail. Readers can be glad the two men went to the trouble, as The Oregon Trail is early American history packaged as an entertaining travelogue. As Buck notes, “Naiveté is the mother of adventure.”

His audacious plan was to follow as closely as possible the old Oregon Trail, the 2,000-mile route by which thousands of American settlers migrated west in the 1840s and 1850s.

In the first pages of his book The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey, Buck (rightfully) wonders why two middle-aged men decided to spend four months, side by side, on a butt-breaking wooden seat maneuvering a covered wagon, pulled by three mules, from Missouri to Oregon. Review: The Oregon Trail: A new American Journey CloseĪUTHOR RINKER BUCK DESCRIBES himself as a “divorced boozehound with a bad driving record and emerging symptoms of low self-esteem.” His brother, Nick, is a former ski instructor, part-time actor and carpenter.

The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck