John B. Wyeth, a young cousin of the Boston trader Nathaniel Wyeth, describes joining his 1832 overland expedition to Oregon and turning back disillusioned. The naturalist John Kirk Townsend crossed the Rockies with the 1834 expedition, recording birds and mammals, fur-trade rendezvous, trappers and Native peoples on the way to the Columbia River.
Two eyewitness accounts of the early Oregon trail, from Thwaites’s Early Western Travels. Download the free EPUB.