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摘要
摘要
"In what The Washington Post has called ""fascinating,"" Frank McLynn has penned a year-by-year account of the pioneering efforts to conquer and settle the American West. Wagons West is a stirring history of the years from 1840 to 1849-between the era of the fur trappers and the beginning of the gold rush. In all the sagas of human migration, few can top the drama of the journey by Midwestern farmers to Oregon and California. Although they used mountain men as guides, they went almost literally into the unknown, braving dangers from hunger, thirst, disease, and drowning. Using original diaries and memoirs, McLynn ""provides intimate, perceptive insights into that time"" (The Baltimore Sun) and underscores the incredible heroism and dangerous folly on the overland trails. His well-informed and authoritative narrative investigates the events leading up to the opening of the trails, the wagons and animals used by the pioneers, the role of women, relations with Native Americans, and much else. The climax arrives in McLynn's expertly re-created tale of the dreadful Donner party, and he closes with Brigham Young and the Mormons beginning communites of their own. Full of high drama, tragedy, and triumph, it brilliantly chronicles one of the principal chapters in the creation of the United States as we know it today."
评论 (5)
出版社周刊评论
Rarely has a book so wonderfully brought to life the riveting tales of Americans' trek to the Pacific. A prolific British writer taken by the complex aspirations and often desperate hardships of the saints and scoundrels who filled the Western trails, McLynn (Carl Gustav Jung; Napoleon) relates their travails with a brio and understanding too seldom encountered in books on this naturally compelling subject. He vividly paints the unforgiving geography and the obstacles of human nature that often daunted but rarely defeated these pioneers. And he overlooks few of the people. There are plenty of familiar characters here, their stories freshly told: the ill-fated Donner Party, the Whitmans on their way to Oregon, mountain man Jim Bridger, the historian Francis Parkman and the Mormons. What helps make this narrative distinctive is that McLynn doesn't limit himself to known pioneers. His pen captures characters and situations from almost every wagon train that crossed the continent in seven or so pivotal years (1841-1847). Women play a large role in his pages. The outsider's perspective that allows McLynn to offer shrewd comparisons between European and American conditions does make one wish for more analysis. Most of all, though, he leaves the reader with a fuller understanding of the grit and resolve that motivated waves of people seeking escape and opportunity to head West and make the United States a continental nation in fact as well as in name. 16 pages of b&w illus.; maps. (Jan.) Forecast: This could do very well regionally, like H.W. Brands's recent and equally engaging The Age of Gold. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
Detailed, intermittently interesting, but finally unrewarding study of America's 19th-century overland expansion from (perhaps too) prolific biographer/historian McLynn (Napoleon, 2002, etc.). "The 19th century saw the American character at its best, and the best of that best was probably evinced on the wagon trains West." This cheering sentiment, like much else in McLynn's sweeping study, is factually questionable and ultimately empty. The author is keen to demonstrate what the drive west says about the American character, marked in his view by "permanent rootlessness . . . spatial mobility, relocation, and the belief in the Fresh Start." In doing so, however, he overlooks a basic reality of 19th-century life: most of the men who went west (often accompanied by unwilling women and children) did so not out of some grand sense of Manifest Destiny or adventure, but because they wanted land, a commodity in short supply in the crowded East. Generations of American historians have established this fundamentally economic motivation for the acquisition of lebensraum, but McLynn persists in holding a romanticized and eminently European view of the era, as well as an eminently European lack of knowledge about the Native American cultures that Anglo pioneers encountered and battled. That said, he does a reasonable job of charting the rise and fall of such important overland routes as the Oregon and Santa Fe trails and of depicting some of the well-known pioneers and explorers who crossed them, such as Charles Fremont, Jedediah Smith, and the unfortunate members of the Donner Party. McLynn's anecdotes and odd bits of fact, which make up the best parts here, are well chosen, particularly those having to do with how newcomers to the West gouged, swindled, and otherwise mistreated those who arrived a day later, a constant of American history much worthier of examination than our supposed wanderlust. Only marginally useful for general readers, and likely to be dismissed by specialists and knowledgeable buffs.
《书目》(Booklist)书评
Since Francis Parkman wrote The Oregon Trail in 1849, the westward trek to Oregon and California has become enshrined in our national history and mythology. McLynn is a historian and a visiting professor in the literature department at Strathclyde University. His account of the westward migration covers the years 1840^-49, spanning the time between the eclipse of the mountain men and the beginning of the gold rush. McLynn covers familiar ground, but he covers it well. His analysis of the roots and effects of the manifest destiny concept is especially incisive, and his descriptions of the hardships and adventures of life on the trails are inspiring and sometimes heartrending. Relying on original diaries and memoirs, McLynn eloquently illustrates how diverse groups of people, including midwestern farmers, Native Americans, Mormons, and missionaries, played their parts in transforming the West while being transformed by it. This work will be a valuable addition to western history collections. --Jay Freeman
Choice 评论
British historian McLynn has provided a detailed account of the migration to settle the US West, c. 1840-49. Readers are informed in considerable detail of farmers from the Midwest (hardened by years of combat with nature) and other workers from the East displaced by hard times who seized the opportunity to become a significant part of the epic quest to reach (especially) Oregon or California. The difficulties of the Great American Desert (prairie lands); the severity of mountainous terrain, heat of summer, and cold of winter; and the breakdown of man, beast, and wagon are revealed against a background of propaganda of a promised land and a national mind-set concerning Manifest Destiny. The way was uncharted; wagon trains embracing human livestock cargoes necessarily hove close to rivers (whenever possible); dangers from Native Americans and wild animals; and the enormity of hostile physiogeography of the lands are only part of the detail of the Odyssey provided by chronicles, diaries, and notes of the trail now maintained in archival collections. Maps, photographs, bibliography, and index are valuable adjuncts to this fascinating account of the trek to the West. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. All levels/collections. G. J. Martin emeritus, Southern Connecticut State University
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
While the title implies that all westward trails will be covered, McLynn (literature, Strathclyde Univ.; Villa and Zapata) describes only the trail across the central United States to Oregon and California and only for the period from the Bidwell party of 1841 to the Mormon emigration of 1847-48. This allows him to explain why the emigration occurred and to put it into the context of Manifest Destiny. Drawing on numerous diaries and previously published research, he tells the story of each wagon train that set out from Missouri or Iowa during the early years but is selective for the later years, being careful to cover the Donner Party and the Mormon emigration of 1847-48 in detail. By putting both the California and Oregon trails together in one book and placing the story in a national context, McLynn provides a very useful starting point for undergraduates and general readers to begin their own investigations into this aspect of American history. He also provides an extensive bibliography to continue those investigations. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.-Stephen H. Peters, Northern Michigan Univ. Lib., Marquette (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
目录
Illustrations | p. ix |
Preface | p. xi |
Introduction | p. 1 |
1 Manifest Destiny | p. 5 |
2 The Reasons Why | p. 19 |
3 To Boldly Go | p. 49 |
4 The Woman in the Sunbonnet | p. 92 |
5 The Great Migration | p. 130 |
6 Through Flood and Famine | p. 177 |
7 'Never Take No Cutoffs' | p. 229 |
8 California Catches Up | p. 282 |
9 Tragedy in the Snows | p. 326 |
10 Saints and Sinners | p. 371 |
Epilogue | p. 427 |
Bibliography | p. 443 |
Notes | p. 477 |
Index | p. 497 |