Across the Great Divide : Robert Stuart and the Discovery of the Oregon Trail

Robert Stuart''s discovery of the Oregon Trail opened up the West to settlers and ranks as one of the great, untold adventure odysseys of the nineteenth century. In the early 1800s the fur trade was perhaps the largest business in North America with fur trade companies vying for monopoly of the trade in the wilds of America. Stuart, a Scottish immigrant in his late twenties, was a junior partner in John Jacob Astor''s Pacific Fur Company (PFC) who set off to establish the first American trading colony on the Pacific coast.

A year later, Stuart led a seven-man party overland to obtain desperately needed supplies and support from Astor, who had seemingly forgotten them. Travelling from west to east, Stuart and his rag-tag expedition journeyed through uncharted country, enduring near starvation (Stuart had to prevent one man from devouring his weakened companion), illness, Indian attacks, blinding blizzards and weeks of sub-zero temperatures. Nevertheless, due largely to Stuart''s courage, restraint and extraordinary endurance, all of the men made it safely back to St. Louis.

This book, drawing on unpublished family letters and journals, tells the story of Robert Stuart''s 1812-1813 expedition for the first time. His discovery of the Oregon Trail opened up tp the West to settlers and ranks as one of the great untold adventure odysseys of the nineteenth century.