![]() I could see the young faces becoming withered and crusted by exposure to wind and sun, and the older faces becoming hardened and set. ![]() I could feel how tired and weary they felt at the end of even a good day. I could picture these people, a mix of quite different backgrounds and incomes, growing closer and more understanding or more leery and wiser as the migration became a way of life. Did any two people ever feel the same? Did ever one soul know another, though they talked at night, though sometimes in hunger and in isolation they sought to make their bodies one, the all-mother in her loneliness trying to take back home the lost child-man? She wondered if he felt the same as she did. Guthrie’s men are both strong and weak, as are the women, and he seems to know both sexes well.what makes them the same and what makes them different, and how much both were needed to make such an undertaking work at all. The thought of the women, visibly pregnant, prodding the oxen while walking the trail, wore me to a bone. Makes you wonder how anyone ever had the courage to set out, particularly with children in tow. Guthrie shows us the physical hardships of the journey, which would surely be enough to defeat most of us, but which we could all fairly well imagine but he also shows us the emotional toll that such a choice entails. When I went back to review the passages I had marked while reading, almost all of them were Dick. Of course, his lost youth was danger and mountains and the capability to survive, but wasn’t he longing for what most of us older people long for?Īt the nub of it did he just want his youth back? Beaver, streams, squaws, danger-were they just names for his young time? I felt I got to know Dick Summers in a way that I could strangely relate to. No use to stand against the stream of change and time. By that system the country belonged to the Indians, or maybe someone before them or someone before them. ![]() The fur hunter didn’t have title to the mountain no matter if he did say finders keepers. Everybody had his life to make, and every time its way, one different from another. He didn’t blame the Oregoners as he had known old mountain men to do. What I loved the most about him, however, was his open mind never thinking the world should be like him or give him any particular homage. #The way west how toIn fact, they would hardly have known how to get where they were going. I recognized right away that without men like Dick, none of the others would have ever survived to do the settling. A seasoned mountain man who has been farming in Missouri, he signs on to pilot the group as far as the Dalles. My favorite character, by far, however, was Dick Summers. That was the moment I knew I was going to love Lije, no going back. Evans figured he would have some business with the man who came to shoot Rock. ![]() At the outset of the story, there is a move to kill all the dogs, many thinking they would be a nuisance on such a long trip. There is one more member of the Evans family that I have not mentioned, but for whom I developed a great attachment, the dog, Rock. During the journey, Lije discovers himself as a leader and we discover that a good man can be a strong man that a quiet man can make all the noise that is needed. Lije Evans, his wife Rebecca, and his son Brownie are one of a group of families who sign on with a wagon train to make the journey, and they represent, in my eyes, the perfect depiction of the kind of strong individuals who carved out this new land into civilization. During the journey, Lije dis This book might be as close as you will ever come to knowing what it was like to leave Independence, Missouri in 1836 and make your way by wagon along the Oregon Trail to the wilderness that was Oregon. ![]() This book might be as close as you will ever come to knowing what it was like to leave Independence, Missouri in 1836 and make your way by wagon along the Oregon Trail to the wilderness that was Oregon. ![]()
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