The American West was a notion, not a nation. It was a process, not a place. The native animal and human life of the West was displaced, replaced, and exterminated- sixty million bison to make way for European bog animals, billions of passenger pigeons for nothing, and ninety percent of aboriginal native Americans, out of an original population of possibly a hundred million, by accident and design. Late in the summer of 2013, I set out to find the Old West, what it had been, and what had replaced it. The quest for my own wild panorama would turn wheels of fortune into a movable feast of Wagon Days. And if this don’t get your fire started, your wood’s wet.

Albert Jerome Dickson was fourteen years old in 1864 when he left LaCrosse, Wisconsin, in a small caravan of covered wagons headed for Montana Territory. Thousands of emigrants had preceded him on the Oregon Trail, but none ever described the journey in sharper detail. Covered Wagon Days recreates the daily progress of Dickson's party, which included his guardians, Joshua and Rebecca Ridgley. The logistics of such a trip, the sights along a trail marked by ruts and fresh graves, the rigors of camping, the encounters with Indians and returning pilgrims and vigilantes running after road agents—all figure in Dickson's memoir. The payoff for the Ridgleys is not the gold being discovered in the mountains near Virginia City but a fine farm in Gallatin Valley. As vivid as any novel about the Oregon Trail and pioneering in the Northwest, Covered Wagon Days, first published in 1929, is based on journals and materials that were edited by the author's son, Arthur Jerome Dickson.

Describes what it was like traveling on the Oregon Trail, including what travelers ate, wore, and saw along the route

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This is the story of the emigrants following the Oregon Trail in the year of 1867. One of families is the Silas Martin family and daughter Mary who keeps a diary of events along the trail. Mary had two suitors during the trip-flamboyant John James Fairfield, 19-year-old son of Capt. Fairfield and James Monroe Cromwell, son of Rev. Cromwell. In the spring 1867, construction on the transcontinental railroad had reached Fort Kearney, Nebraska. Some emigrants were now using the railroad for their westward push. In early spring of 1867, Silas Martin joined 20 other emigrant wagons and 2 cargo wagons at Independence Missouri to begin their trek up the trail. Capt. Zeb Fairfield is the wagon master. Capt. Fairfield has a secret contract with the Army to bring 200 Spencer repeating rifles and $200,000 in gold to General Armstrong Custer bivouacked at Fort Hall by September. The first attack on the wagon train was by the Platte River by a remnant of the Quantrill Raiders and the Cole Younger gang. As the wagon train moved westward, it moved into an area known as the High Plains Indian Wars as designated by the Army. The Sioux and Arapahoe Indians joined forces to attack settlers and wagon trains. The first Indian attack was before Fort Laramie by a large number of Indians. Several emigrants were killed and several dozen Indians. A small Indian war party attacked emigrants in a broken down wagon with one emigrant killed and several Indians. At Fort Hall, four the wagons turn north to Fort Henry. The first days the wagons were accompanied by the Calvary due to an uprising by any Blackfoot Indians. On the third night, a Blackfoot Indian slipped into the camp and attempted to kill Mary.

For visitors to the Martin's Cove historic site in Wyoming, Patience Loader has become an icon of the disastrous winter entrapment of the Martin and Willie handcart companies. Her record of those events is important, but there is much else of interest in her autobiography. In fact, it is a bit unusual that someone such as her would have left such an engaging record of her life. The daughter of an English gardener, Patience Loader became a boarding house servant, domestic maid, and seamstress. Converted to Mormonism, she shipped with her parents to America. They joined the ill-fated Martin company, which because of poor planning and a late start west, was caught poorly prepared by severe high plains snowstorms in October and November 1856. The combined fatalities of the Martin and Willie companies made this the worst disaster in the history of overland travel. Patience's father was one of those who died. After reaching Utah, Patience took the unusual step for a Mormon of marrying a soldier, John Rozsa, stationed at Camp Floyd. The troops there had made up the Utah Expedition, sent to ensure federal authority over the Mormons. Rozsa was a Hungarian immigrant and Mormon convert. When the Utah troops were recalled for the Civil War, Patience accompanied her husband, as an army laundress, to Washington, D.C., running a boarding house while Rozsa fought. After the war, he died at Fort Leavenworth of consumption, and Patience returned alone to Utah, where she became a cook at a mining camp in American Fork Canyon. Her autobiography ends there in 1872, though she lived till 1922.

Included the reports of the executive officers, and for many years those of the educational and charitable institutions.