About This Book

The Fascinating History of the Rapid Expansion of Roads, Canals, and Railways that Changed America Forever

While the great overland migration routes to America’s far west are well known and documented—the California, Oregon, Mormon, and Santa Fe Trails, the Central Overland and Pony Express—less attention has been given to how Americans in the first decades of the republic traveled across the western frontiers of the original colonies. Following the revolution, Americans began to seek their fortunes to the west in greater numbers. Land grants to veterans inspired others to move, including tradesmen, merchants, and tavern owners. With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the country doubled in size, and the rate of migration became extraordinary, with wider and more durable roads built, ferries installed at river crossings, canals cut to move goods, regular stage routes established, and ultimately the first railroad tracks laid down. Entire regions that supported few communities in the 1790s exploded in population, and as a result seven new states were admitted to the Union in the decade following the War of 1812. By 1839, the National Road extended more than 700 miles from Washington, DC, to central Illinois, New York’s Erie Canal operated from Albany to Buffalo, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad carried passengers briskly west, ultimately to the Ohio River.

To the Wide Missouri: Traveling in America During the First Decades of Westward Expansion by Louis Garavaglia covers the routes and methods that emigrants used to reach the west in the forty-year period following the Louisiana Purchase. Using contemporary maps and the graphic descriptions found in diaries, journals, letters, and newspaper accounts, the author not only details the land and water routes that led settlers to the western country, but also illustrates the hardship, perseverance, humor, and romance that colored their journey.

Louis A. Garavaglia a graduate of Western Michigan University, served as an Army lieutenant with a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) unit in Vietnam. Dividing his time between writing and mechanical design, he has published numerous articles in both historical and technical journals and holds two U.S. patents.

Praise for To the Wide Missouri:

“Garavaglia’s well-organized book traces American westward travel across rivers, along roads, via canals, and, by the 1830s, over rails. His research has uncovered the trials and tribulations of early travel as well as its many triumphs—a crucial process in the settlement of the American West.”—Indiana Magazine of History