So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California 1812-1848, by Will Bagley, $45. Nearly 200 years after the first white men made it overland to the Pacific, the names of the California and Oregon trails still excite Americans.
The stories of those hearty mountain men and pioneers, their hardships and disasters, their exhilaration and disappointment in reaching the far lands are the history of the West. And no one tells the history of the early western trails better than Utah historian Will Bagley.
This is an epic story drawing on official records, letters, journals, personal accounts, newspaper articles and legend, all woven together into an absorbing narrative. Not since Jesse Unruh wrote “The Plains Across” more than 30 years ago, has anyone tackled such a massive project on westward migration. Or done it this well. “So Rugged and Mountainous” is as good as history gets.
Bagley began his research as part of a National Park Service effort to protect the historic Oregon and California trails, and “So Rugged and Mountainous” is the first of four volumes Bagley is writing on the subject. The project is called “Overland West.”
“The opening of a wagon road to the Far West began a transformation far greater than anyone in America could imagine,” writes Bagley. Some of the participants were well aware they were patriots in the national drama of America’s manifest destiny. John C. Fremont, the Pathfinder, believed that one pass he explored would be a thoroughfare “for nations to the end of time.”
Most westward-bound Americans were not looking for immortality. The trappers and mountain men did not aspire to change the West but merely wanted to be a part of it. They were followed by the pioneers, who sought to tame the land to find a better life.
“It is remarkable . . . and strange that so many of all kinds and classes of People should sell out comfortable homes in Missouri and Elsewhere pack up and start across such an emmence Barren waste to settle in some new Place of which they have at most so uncertain information but this is the character of my countrymen,” wrote a frontiersman.
Bagley writes about not just whites, but also about American Indians and the role they played in the western migration. The author disputes the John Wayne view of Indians attacking every wagon train, quoting figures that between 1840 and 1860, Indians killed 362 emigrants, while the emigrants killed 426 Indians.
Along with the geography and the stories of travelers, Bagley includes the nitty-gritty of everyday life. He spends nearly eight pages on the virtues of mules and oxen and how to train both. In fact, there’s very little about the trails that Bagley leaves out.
This is a magnificent story, “a dramatic record of sacrifice and suffering, endurance and failure, death and survival, and the small victories and great defeats that marked the lives of the people who followed these trails,” writes Bagley. “It is not only a great American epic but an enduring tribute to the human spirit.”
The Sundance Kid: The Life of Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, by Donna B. Ernst, $29.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. The story of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has been told over and over again, so you would think there was nothing left to say. But in her second book on Harry Longabaugh, better known as Sundance, Donna B. Ernst has turned up new information, mostly family stuff. That’s because Ernst’s husband is Sundance’s great-great nephew.
For generations, the Longabaugh family was mute on the subject of its most infamous member. Sundance’s sister wrote him out of her will, and others were mum, except for an admission by Ernst’s husband’s grandfather: “I had an uncle that died in South America; he robbed banks and trains for a living.” The Ernsts had no idea who that was until after the Paul Newman-Robert Redford movie came out.
Ernst hews to the accepted story line, that Butch and Sundance were men of a certain honor, who kept their word and robbed banks and trains rather than individuals. And she agrees that both men, already badly wounded, died in Bolivia, when, rather than being captured, Butch shot Sundance and then himself.
The greatest mystery left standing is: Who was Etta Place (probably Ethel Place) and what happened to her? No one knows for sure her real name or where she was born, and while Ethel and Sundance lived together as husband and wife, there is no record of a marriage. She apparently left South America before Sundance died (or else she might have died there in a robbery). She may have come back to America and even applied for Social Security later on.
In a book both entertaining and informative, Ernst adds to the growing body of work on the most famous members of the Wild Bunch, but she raises her share of questions too.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes regularly about new regional nonfiction releases.
