In the year 1844, a party of fifty men, women and children set out for California. They walked two thousand miles, across trackless plain and desert, fording rivers and climbing mountains.

They found a new trail through the wilderness, hoisted their wagons up a sheer cliff, were caught by the winter snows and faced starvation, with nothing to rely on but their own courage and trust in each other.

These are their stories; the doctor-diarist and party co-leader, the old mountain-man who guided them, the feisty woman with her brood of children who means to rejoin her husband in California, the taciturn wagon master… all inexorably drawn to Truckee’s Trail!

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What others are saying...

The writer has a good ear for conversation and a deft command of period detail, as well as the authentic language of the time. She makes clear the sheer amount of hard physical work that this journey entailed, from hitching up in the morning, to setting up camp at the end of a days travel, all the way from the Mississippi-Missouri River to Sutters’ Fort. She also manages to convey something of the wonder and peril of the emigrant journey across country where they were often forced to blaze their own path. In writing “To Truckee’s Trail” she has convincingly fleshed out a set of people about whom only the barest details are known, and suggested how they managed to avoid the fate which befell a similar party, traveling over the same trail, only two years later.
—Kathy Johnson, reviewer for The Sparks Tribune

To Truckee's Trail makes me appreciate the generations who came before me and all they went through to build this country--a task from which Americans, generations later, now profit. To Truckee's Trail is one of those stories that should be read in our high schools, and colleges, to make American history comes alive to students. It is a story that stays in the reader's head long after the last page is turned. It makes one feel grateful even for the smallest comforts we have today, and it encourages one to persevere to accomplish great deeds oneself.
—Tyler Tychelaar, Reader Views reviews