Description
Book SynopsisThe colorful saga of miners and settlers struggling to get from here to there in the days before railroads reached the West is recreated in this book combining historical photographs, advertisements, posters, and contemporary accounts. The author describes in detail the technology of pre-industrial modes of transportation.
Trade Review"Schwantes takes readers inside bouncing coaches as they rattled over broken terrain, up steep and slippery slopes, and down twisting ravines across Montana, Oregon and Washington and into the staterooms and on the open-air decks of the thrashing side-wheelers and sternwheelers of the Columbia and Missouri rivers. This is popular history at its best, written by a scholar who knows his subject from the driver's box to the quarter deck." William Lang, Portland State University "All in all, the reach of Schwantes' book is so wide that it is very much like a general history - an outstanding general history - of the Northern West for the period form the 1840s to the 1890s." Richard M. Brown, University of Oregon
