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. 

In his later years, Ezra Meeker gained fame and renown by undertaking a journey across the USA across the Oregon Trail once again. This famous expedition of 1906-1908 is recalled, with some of the monuments Meeker placed in the small towns he traversed along the way photographed. The final chapters see Meeker personally meet President Theodore Roosevelt. 

By the time this autobiography was published in 1922, much of what Meeker described in the United States was well on the way to being bygone. The Western reaches of the country were undergoing rapid settlement, as advances such as the radio and the automobile made North America continent seem much smaller. 

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.