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Across the Great Divide
by Laton McCartney
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Gardners Books (2005)
ISBN: 0750937564
EAN: 9780750937566
Binding/Media: Paperback - 224 pages
Edition: New Ed
SKU: S342-1094
Condition: Like New
Comments: UNREAD but may have a crease or mark or minor imperfections. In stock - Sent fast from British booksellers.
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Customer Reviews
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How many wagons on The Oregon Trail knew who to thank ?
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-11-13
During an overnight stay in hospital I put this book to an unfair test. Not feeling to well I read the chapters out of sequence. For me every chapter was a justifiable interesting read. That is surely an exceptional test of a writer. This book is worth its shelf space for any lover of adventure and any follower of American history.
Laton McCartney is a descendant of Robert Stuart. He has from unpublished family letters and journals been able to make Stuart's place in history together with Astor's commercial interests come alive to the reader throughout the book. The fact that Stuart's undertaking was West to East where any support was infinitely more difficult and against a background of British colonial force and Indian hostility makes this even more remarkable.
Many of the men sent on these expeditions were not at the start explorers. In view of this what some of them achieved was incredible. The debt that the wagon trains owe to Robert Stuart for blazing The South Pass trail and enabling the opening up of the American west to them is immense and very undervalued in history.
The terrible sea voyage with a brutal captain, being seen as fair game to be picked off or stolen from by Indian tribes, but helped by some, hunting or starving to near cannibalism, near death illness, gear and food being swept away in the rivers, just being in open country during the wrong season or having to build a winter retreat and hunker down - it's all there and much more to find.
My future resolution, to get a big contoured map and relive the endurance these iron men by tracing their tracks on the landscape. If you want to see the type of country these men came through by horse, on foot, by scratch built canoe and raft just look on the Internet and remember they were on their own.
The book does Robert Stuart justice in full measure. I will by buying another copy for my son and his children.
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Across the Great Divide
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-12-27
Robert Stuart was the first explorer to cross the entire continent of the United States from west to east. He discovered the southernly route across the Rockies through the South Pass and followed what would become the Oregon Trail twenty three years later after his crossing.
His contributions to the Astoria project also were covered in this volume. He was truly a contributor to the success of the establishment of the American clain to this country, althouth this did not happen until some year later after the fort had been abandoned to the British.
He, and the early Astorians certainly deserve the credit for this project of John Astor.
Norma Dart
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