![]() ![]() ![]() The Oregon Trail follows a modern covered-wagon trip he took with his brother across the entire 2,100 miles of the trail in the summer of 2011, charting more or less the same path that sent some 400,000 migrants west before the Civil War. Thomas Hart Benton or the Missouri Compromise than to actually know something about America’s basic means of transportation for a century.”īuck’s dogmatic, at times unhinged devotion to mules turns out to be a great gift to his book. History’s vain gatekeepers ignore this plain truth, Buck writes, because “it is a lot more prestigious for professional academics to sound learned about Sen. ![]() Though historians and erstwhile computer games agree that oxen pulled more covered wagons across the trail, Buck-with great bluster-argues that wagons and mules were a transformative economic force invaluable to the nation’s westward expansion. ![]() As Buck tells it, their name shifted along with America’s westward movement, from the Kentucky mule and Tennessee mule to, in the 1840s, the Missouri mule.Īs the breed became more coveted, it also became big business, leading to genetic chaos and schemes to get rich off mule-hungry pioneers. Washington’s mules, originally sired by the accurately named Royal Gift, would first be dubbed American Mammoths. An offspring of a male donkey and female horse, mules do not occupy an especially cherished place in the American imagination today, but they did in the 19 th century. ![]()
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