Describes the sights and events a frontier family encounters travelling from South Dakota to the Ozarks.

In 1803, when the United States purchased Louisiana from France, the great expanse of this new American territory was a blank-not only on the map but in our knowledge. President Thomas Jefferson keenly understood that the course of the nation's destiny lay westward and that a national "Voyage of Discovery" must be mounted to determine the nature and accessibility of the frontier. He commissioned his young secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to lead an intelligence-gathering...

I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold'. Charles Marlow's dark intuition here arrives at the culmination of his physical and psychological quest in search of the infamous ivory-trader Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's most famous short story, Heart of Darkness. Ambiguously drawn to the powerful 'voice' of this autocratic...

"The celebrated journals of Lewis and Clark's legendary expedition into the uncharted American West, abridged into a single volume and translated into modern English, with nuanced observations from star author and journalist Anthony Brandt. At the start of the 19th century, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark embarked on an unprecedented voyage of discovery. Their assignment was to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Territory and record the geography,...

"Presents excerpts from the diary of Sallie Hester, a teenager who traveled West on the Oregon Trail in a wagon train in the mid-1800s"--