VIDEO PRESENTATION: "The Oregon Trail: Amazing Pioneer Stories"

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VIDEO PRESENTATION: "The Oregon Trail" with Bill Wiemuth and Laura Sable

This 50-minute video presentation shares the incredible adventure of the brave pioneer families along their journey to the Pacific Northwest along the Oregon Trail – and their powerful impact on the western expansion of the United States. Bill is joined for this presentation by Laura Sable as they share this amazing story through diary readings directly from the pioneers.

If you'd like to LISTEN to me introduce this fascinating story, CLICK HERE. (3min32sec)

If you'd like to READ my summary, continue on below.

During his famous exploration across North America, Meriwether Lewis in 1806 had described what today is Oregon’s Willamette River valley as “the only desirable situation for a settlement which I have seen on the west side of the Rocky Mountains.”

As the letters of the Pacific Northwest’s early explorers, fur-trappers, entrepreneurs, and missionaries were carried back to New England, they were widely published. They frequently praised the region as a land of fertile soil, temperate climate, endless timber, meadows filled with game, and rivers teaming with fish.

But why make that arduous and dangerous journey across the continent? Many pioneers moved west in hope of a new life and in order to escape the turmoil of a severe United States economic collapse that became known as The Panic of 1837. Many desperate Americans began to consider the Pacific Northwest as an opportunity to start anew. Year by year, wagon trains to the west grew larger and larger.

Many of the Oregon Trail pioneers wrote journals to record their experiences. Throughout my HistoryHighlights.com Oregon Trail audiobook, I am joined by Laura Sable to share their writings and let those pioneers describe their goals, challenges, struggles, tragedies, and triumphs.

Jesse Applegate, an emigrant of 1843, wrote: “They have undertaken to perform with slow-moving oxen a journey of two thousand miles. The way lies over trackless wastes, wide and deep rivers, ragged and lofty mountains..."

Elizabeth Dixon Smith wrote in 1847, "We started this morning at sunrise and did not get to camp until after dark and there was not one dry thread on one of us, not even my babe, and I was so fatigued that I could scarcely speak or step.”

Henry Garrison wrote, "I have not tried to portray the terrible conditions we were placed in. No tongue can tell, nor pen describe the heart-rending scenes through which we passed."

Primarily through the middle two decades of the 1800s, it is estimated that more than 300,000 men, women and children crossed the continent, walking more than 2000 miles toward the hope of a better future. The impact of their migration altered the destiny of the United States and impacted the history of the world.

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