1844. The Stevens-Murphy company left Missouri to be the first wagons into California through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Mostly Irish Catholics, the party sought religious freedom and education in the mission-dominated land. When a heavy snowstorm hits in October, the party separates in three directions. Now young Mary Sullivan, newlywed Sarah Montgomery, widowed Ellen Murphy, and her pregnant sister-in-law Maolisa each risks losing those they loved....

Boone's Lick is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry's triumphant return to the kind of story that made him famous -- an enthralling tale of the nineteenth-century West. McMurtry brings his unique blend of historical fact and sheer storytelling genius to the Cecil family's arduous journey from Boone's Lick, Missouri, to Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming. Fifteen-year-old Shay describes the journey that begins when his Ma, Mary Margaret, decides...

An account of the author's trip across the plains from the Missouri River to Puget Sound at the age of twenty-two, with an ox and cow team in 1852, and of his return with an ox team in the year 1906, at the age of seventy-six, with copious excerpts from his journal and other reliable sources of information; a narrative of events and descriptive of present and past conditions.

In 1863 Clarissa Graham leaves St. Louis, Missouri and joins a wagon train headed west, to provide a better life for her daughter. As the trail turns increasingly dangerous, Dawson Clements, a jaded ex-soldier helps Clarissa and her daughter survive. As they near Montana can Clarissa convince Dawson to remain by her side for a journey that will last a lifetime?

Told in riveting, keenly observed poetry, a moving first person narrative as experienced by a young survivor of the tragic Donner Party of 1846.

The Last Crossing is a sweeping tale of breathtaking quests, adventurous detours, and hard-won redemption. Englishmen Charles and Addington Gaunt are ordered by their tyrannical industrialist father to find their brother Simon, who has gone missing in the wilds of the American West. Charles, a disillusioned artist, and Addington, a disgraced military captain, set off to remote Fort Benton on the edge of the Montana frontier. The brothers hire the...

In the turbulent mid-1800s, Charity Morgan is a beautiful, businesslike young woman whose devout religious community is losing its Pennsylvania homestead to the economic recession. To survive and stay together, she and the other members make plans to form a wagon train to Oregon, where free land is plentiful. There's just one catch. No wagon master is better equipped to lead them safely west than inmate Casey Tremayne and his ragtag band of felons....

After her father dies in the fall of 1849, a little girl and her family follow Mr. Reed's wagon train west, discovering the challenges, excitement, and danger of the frontier on their way to their homestead in California.