By war-making and shrewd negotiating, the 11th president expanded U.S. territory by a third.
It's a city framed by the breathtaking peaks of Mount St. Helens and Mount Hood, only a 30-minute bike ride from the lush farmland of the Willamette Valley, and driven by a powerful sense of community that allows its citizens to hold on to the best of its pioneer past while collaborating on the future. Randy Gragg explains why American Heritage’s Great American Place Award goes to...
The world about us is strewn with relics that are quietly eloquent of the struggle that ended half a century ago
The first caravans lumbered across two thousand miles of dangerous, inhospitable wilderness in 1843, the year of the Great Migration. To a surprising degree it’s still possible to follow something very like their route.
A small but dependable pleasure of travel is encountering such blazons of civic pride as “Welcome to the City of Cheese, Chairs, Children, and Churches!”
For many children who accompanied their parents west across the continent in the 1840s and '50s, the journey was a supreme adventure
“Surveyor, mountain man, soldier, businessman, wanderer, captain of emigrants, farmer…he was himself the westward-moving frontier.”
Man, Land, and History in the Deepest Gorge on Earth
The tragic journey of the Donner Party