Böcker av LeRoy R. Hafen

A collection of Pike's Peak gold rush diaries chronicling the struggles, dreams, and heartaches of those who traveled the overland routes to untold riches. The diarists who came along the Arkansas and Platte Rivers and along trails from Texas, Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois created records of the landscapes and people they encountered.

A history that is filled with colorful pathmarkers like Jedediah Smith, John C Fremont, and Kit Carson; with packers, home seekers, and mail couriers; and with horse thieves and enslavers of Indian women and children.

Thomas Fitzpatrick was a trapper and a trailblazer who became the head of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. With Jedediah Smith he led the trapper band that discovered South Pass; he then shepherded the first two emigrant wagon trains to Oregon, was official guide to Fremont on his longest expedition. This title tells about his life.

John Jacob Astor's dream of empire took shape as the American Fur Company. At Astor's retirement in 1834, this corporate monopoly reached westward from a depot on Mackinac Island to subposts beyond the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. This book focuses on eighteen men who represented the American Fur Company and its successors.

It is unparalleled in history, the procession of Latter-Day Saints pushing handcarts from Iowa City and Florence (Omaha) to their promised Zion by the Great Salt Lake. The migration is described in Handcarts to Zion, which draws on diaries and reports of the participants, rosters of the ten companies, and a collection of the songs sung on the trail.