The Boone's Lick Road (BLR) was opened in 1816 and was the principal route west from St. Charles for the next century. This book gives a brief history of the BLR and a detailed guide to finding the BLR today

Boone's Lick is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry's return to the kind of story that made him famous -- an enthralling tale of the nineteenth-century west. Like his bestsellers Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo, Comanche Moon, and Dead Man's Walk, Boone's Lick transports the reader to the era about which McMurtry writes better and more shrewdly than anyone else. Told with McMurtry's unique blend of historical fact and sheer storytelling genius, the novel follows the Cecil family's arduous journey by riverboat and wagon from Boone's Lick, Missouri, to Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming. Fifteen-year-old Shay narrates, describing the journey that begins when his Ma, Mary Margaret, decides to hunt down her elusive husband, Dick, to tell him she's leaving him. Without knowing precisely where he is, they set out across the plains in search of him, encountering grizzly bears, stormy weather, and hostile Indians as they go. With them are Shay's siblings, G.T., Neva, and baby Marcy; Shay's uncle, Seth; his Granpa Crackenthorpe; and Mary Margaret's beautiful half-sister, Rose. During their journey they pick up a barefooted priest named Father Villy, and a Snake Indian named Charlie Seven Days, and persuade them to join in their travels. At the heart of the novel, and the adventure, is Mary Margaret, whom we first meet shooting a sheriff's horse out from underneath him in order to feed her family. Forceful, interesting, and determined, she is written with McMurtry's trademark deftness and sympathy for women, and is in every way a match for the worst the west can muster. Boone's Lick abounds with the incidents, the excitements, and the dangers of life on the plains. Its huge cast of characters includes such historical figures as Wild Bill Hickok and the unfortunate Colonel Fetterman (whose arrogance and ineptitude led to one of the U.S. Army's worst and bloodiest defeats at the hands of the Cheyenne and Sioux) as well as the Cecil family (itself based on a real family of nineteenth-century traders and haulers). The story of their trek in pursuit of Dick, and the discovery of his second and third families, is told with brilliance, humor, and overwhelming joie de vivre in a novel that is at once high adventure, a perfect western tale, and a moving love story -- it is, in short, vintage McMurtry, combining his brilliant character portraits, his unerring sense of the west, and his unrivaled eye for the telling detail. Boone's Lick is one of McMurtry's richest works of fiction to date.

In 1769, French Canadian fur trader Louis Blanchette built a cabin on the Missouri River in what is today St. Charles. He called the settlement Les Petites Cotes, or the little hills. Other now famous explorers soon passed this way, including Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who began their expedition here in 1804 to explore the Louisiana Purchase territory. Daniel Boone forged a path through St. Charles along the Boone's Lick Trail, which later joined the Santa Fe Trail and then the Oregon Trail. Today St. Charles hosts many annual events to celebrate its rich history and transport visitors to the past. However, the site of Missouri's first state capitol has not survived without tragedy and an occasional natural disaster, including a cholera epidemic, tornadoes, floods, and a couple of disastrous railroad bridge accidents.

Forgiveness comes easy for Sam after he sees his father again, and he leaves Washington DC with a sense of hope that redemption is within reach. But will his hope last? Sam doesn't go home right away; a northward turn to Long Island, New York, places him in the shadow of an equine expert whose connection with Sam runs unexpectedly deep. A foe turned friend helps Sam secure his Morgan breeding plan and the course of his life for years to come. Consequently, Sam finds himself on a comfortable mountaintop, unwilling to enter the valley to face the thresholds of his battle lines. Sam's crossings lead him to new friendships and enemies in territories that stretch from the established, predictable East Coast to the unsettled, wild frontier. He faces corruption, coercion, and slavery mixed with persuasion, abolition, and liberation. While he enjoys stability in his love for Jane and his home, friends, and a growing bond with Abraham Lincoln, numerous trials point Sam away from all he has built, leaving him feeling fiercely resistant to the unknown. He is slow to realize he had forgotten a father's promise. Inevitably backed into a corner, he must make a decision. Will Sam trust the divine placement of the battle line?

The three volumes of My Own Pioneers together tell a remarkable story of the desperate pioneer struggles of four generations of the author’s family. Although the memorable historical journey begins seven generations ago, these three volumes of stories focus on four important pioneer generation. They are the culmination of fifteen years of painstaking research as the author carefully reconstructs her family’s pioneer struggles from before 1830 to 1918 using information from family records, journals, memoirs, histories and letters, supplemented by accounts from their pioneer companions, and by Church and other official records. Volume I tells about the author’s once prosperous pioneer families survived the French and Indian War and the War of 1812, then eventually relocated to join the newly founded Mormon Church. The stories tell how the pressure of mobs and mob wars eventually forced these families to abandon everything as they were driven from place to place, until they found themselves exiled on the western-most border of the United States—at the Missouri River—looking toward the wild and hostile West as their only refuge. Stories describe how dozens of family members were among the Mormon refugees who died by the hundreds at the Missouri River, of illness, starvation and exposure. Yet family members had managed to journey among Indians on the frontier to preach, and had sailed through nearly catastrophic ocean storms to preach in England. And despite much sorrow and hardship, this volume relates how five family members left their loved ones behind at the sickly Missouri River in order to march down the Old Santa Fe Trail in the U.S. Army’s Mormon Battalion to prove their loyalty to the government by helping to fight a war with Mexico.