The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman

On April 28, 1846, Francis Parkman had already decided that he was going to write the history of the settling of America.

With Quincy Adams Shaw, they set forth from St. Louis up the Missouri River and onto the Oregon Trail for a "tour of curiosity and amusement to the Rocky Mountains."

They travelled some 1700 miles, meeting trappers, gamblers, woodsmen, soldiers and Indians and Parkman eventually spent three weeks hunting buffalo with a band of Oglala Sioux.

The following year he published The Oregon Trail, a travelogue which remains one of the great books ever produced by an American and embarked him on a career as one of America's first great historians.