"In the early 1840s the first emigrant wagon trains rolled westward from the United States across plain, desert, and mountain, to a hoped-for good life in Oregon and California. Whole families, with their furniture and livestock crammed into horse- and ox-drawn wagons, followed trails blazed by the official explorers or the pioneering fur-trappers who now turned to guiding the trains. It is these people who tell the story. They tell it through their letters, diaries, books and papers, and they tell it in a way it can never be told again. Rarely was the undertaking so romantic as the technicolor movies suggest. Excessive heat and cold, thirst and starvation, dysentery and cholera, and--on one occasion--even cannibalism, were the pioneers' lot before they won through to fulfil a national destiny. 'Almost unbearable vividness' was the Times Literary Supplement's comment on one of James Hewitt's previous books. Here he again arranges the material written by eyewitnesses and provides a background commentary supported by a complete list of sources, index, 8 maps and 23 photographs."--Dust jacket.