The Prairie Traveler

A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions

Pages: 210

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00-Preface
5:25
01-Chapter 1 Part 1
18:50
02-Chapter 1 Part 2
16:48
03-Chapter 2 Part 1
16:18
04-Chapter 2 Part 2
18:08
05-Chapter 3
27:21
06-Chapter 4 Part 1
20:05
07-Chapter 4 Part 2
22:20
08-Chapter 5 Part 1
17:06
09-Chapter 5 Part 2
30:09
10-Chapter 6 Part 1
21:40
11-Chapter 6 Part 2
34:19
12-Chapter 7
25:26
13-Itineraries I to IV
31:47
14-Itineraries V to VIII
17:32
15-Itineraries IV to XII
12:00
16-Itineraries XIII to XVI
13:24
17-Itineraries XVII to XX
34:35
18-Itineraries XXI to XXIV
16:44
19-Itineraries XXV to XXVII
21:30
20-Appendix
6:05

The Prairie Traveler (1859) is a public domain work.

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About this book

Captain Randolph B. Marcy wrote this practical manual in 1859, published under the authority of the War Department, for emigrants and soldiers crossing the plains between the Mississippi and the Pacific. Drawing on a quarter of a century of frontier service, he set out to give the young traveller the hard-won knowledge that older hands rarely wrote down.

The chapters move from choosing a route to California or Oregon, organising a company and weighing mules against oxen, to packing provisions, finding and purifying water, fording rivers, building wagon boats, preventing stampedes and treating rattlesnake bites. Later sections cover tents and camp furniture, guides such as the Delaware hunters, and the habits of buffalo, antelope and bear, followed by detailed itineraries of the main overland routes.

Today it reads as a firsthand record of how westward travel actually worked, full of practical detail and wry anecdote. Its view of the Plains tribes is very much that of an army officer of the 1850s, which makes it a revealing historical source as well as a handbook.