Students should choose one pair of readings, depending upon interests.  Questions to consider as you read the assigment are included with each pair of readings.  These selections represent three kinds of westward migration stories:  the journalistic narrative, usually published serially in popular magazines or newspapers of the time; actual trail diaries, written by people at the time of their journey, normally intended only for personal use; and memoirs, accounts written later by travelers who wanted to commit their memories to paper, often for family histories or geneological purposes.

The  first set , selections of Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail (1847-49) and Mark Twain's Roughing It (1861-67), describe frontier life in Fort Laramie and surrounding areas.  Parkman, a self-styled historian and journalist, traveled overland to Oregon and California in the late 1840s.  His account was one of the first to describe in detail the lives of overland migrants on the frontier.  Twain's chapters, on the other hand, describe in humorous tone his travels via horseback and stagecoach across the West, as he journeyed from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Carson City, Nevada, where he later became a newspaper editor.

The  second set of readings include the full diaries of two overland migrants to Oregon: James Madison Coon (and his wife, Nancy Iness Miller Coon) in 1847 and Mrs. Amelia Stewart Knight in 1853.  The two diaries are quite different in both tone and substance, although both authors traveled essentially the same route to Oregon.  Each of these diaries was composed at the time, on the wagon road west.

The  third set of readings are selections from the memoirs of three individuals who traveled overland by wagon to Oregon between 1847-1852.  The authors of each of these memoirs were children when they traveled west, and either wrote or dictated their stories of their journeys much later, in the early 1900s, as elderly folks reflecting upon their early life experiences.  The first memoir, "My Trip to Oregon," is that of Calvin Geer, who, as a ten-year-old youngster, accompanied his family west in 1847.  Two of the authors, Harriet Palmer ("Crossing the Plains by Ox-Wagon") and Sarah Sprenger ("Reminiscences"), traveled west as children in 1852.