Even when the old ruts have been paved over by two-lane highways, the views, the geography, the wide-open plains that the pioneers encountered are identical today. One big surprise of the trip was just how much of the original Oregon Trail was there, virtually intact and unchanged, and how many of the old pioneer campgrounds you can still just roll into with your wagon and camp for the night. I also started organizing all of my notes into separate research files (“Covered Wagon Development,” “Cholera Along the Platte”), so I had something to begin with when I returned. I read more than 100 books about the trail and the West before I left on the covered wagon trip. Rinker Buck: Like many writers, I become fixated on a subject once I become interested - I call this my “good” obsessive-compulsive disorder.
How did you prepare for this trip? What were the biggest surprises in terms of what you expected versus what you found once on the trail? Here, Buck talks about the surprises he discovered along the Oregon Trail and the passion that prompted his journey.īookselling This Week: Planning a covered wagon trip across the modern-day Oregon Trail must have required immense organization and research. When Buck was a teenager, he and his brother Kern flew across America in a Piper Cub airplane, a trip that Buck later chronicled in the travel narrative Flight of Passage: A Memoir (Hachette Books). Buck weaves fact, action, and reflection together into a page-turning delight that history buffs and fans of contemporary nonfiction will not want to miss.”Ī longtime journalist, Buck has written for publications such as the Berkshire Eagle, the Hartford Courant, Vanity Fair, New York, and Life. “This is also a moving personal story of brotherhood, endurance, and the kindness of strangers. In The Oregon Trail, “readers learn about wagon design, mule heritage, and what pioneers needed to endure traveling west in the 19th century,” said Dick Hermans of Oblong Books & Music in Millerton, New York.
Writing down his observations at night after making camp, Buck returned from the trail with 30,000 words documenting his trip, along with maps, brochures, local histories, and personal interviews to back up his notes with immense historic detail. In 2011, inspired in part by a family trip from New Jersey to Pennsylvania by covered wagon in the 1950s, Buck and his brother Nick set out in a covered wagon hauled by a team of mules to navigate the old Oregon Trail between Missouri and Oregon. Independent booksellers have selected The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey by Rinker Buck (Simon & Schuster) as the number one Indie Next List pick for July.
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