Join us in the Louise Parker Berry Community Room at 5 p.m. Sunday, June 12 as we welcome Rinker Buck, author of The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey.
Author Rinker Buck
In 2011, writer Rinker Buck and his brother Nick set off to make an authentic covered wagon crossing of the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail. They knew that their chances of failure were high.
“Even if your wheels break halfway across,” his editor told him, “There’s still a great book there.”
In fact, the Buck brothers’ wheels did break, at South Pass on the continental divide in Wyoming; they flipped their provisions cart in Nebraska; and their axle snapped in two in eastern Oregon.
But after making trailside repairs, the Bucks persevered, becoming the first wagon travelers in more than a century to complete a crossing of the trail. Rinker tells the story of their epic adventure in The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey.
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— an announcement from Darien Library
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The idea for the trip was born at a restored Pony Express station in Kansas, where an expert on the Oregon Trail practically dared Rinker to follow the road from Missouri to Oregon by saying that nobody had done it since the pioneers in the late 1800s.
Rinker was no stranger to such adventures. He and his older brother Kern flew across America in a Piper Cub at ages 15 and 17, a historic trip Rinker recounts in his 1997 memoir, Flight of Passage.
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— This book is available through Barrett Bookstore.
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This time, Buck teams up with his brother Nick — a horseman, carpenter and actor — three mules, and a filthy Jack Russell terrier named Olive Oyl, to travel from St. Joseph, Mo., to Baker City, Ore., over the course of four months.
Along the way, the Buck brothers dodge thunderstorms in Nebraska, chase runaway mules across the Wyoming plains, scout more than 500 miles of nearly vanished trail on foot, cross the Rockies, and make desperate 50-mile forced marches for water.
They travel alongside fleets of RVs heading west; meet ranchers and Mormon re-enactors; see ethanol plants, massive wind farms, and huge data centers for Google and Microsoft, and observe the teen dating culture at western rodeo corrals.
But The Oregon Trail is much more than a travelogue. It is also a lively and essential work of history that shatters the comforting myths about the trail years passed down by generations of Americans.
Buck introduces readers to the largely forgotten roles played by trailblazing evangelists, friendly Indian tribes, female pioneers, bumbling U.S. Army cavalrymen, and the scam artists who flocked to the frontier to fleece the overland emigrants.
We also learn how the trail accelerated American economic development and the stories of the pioneers themselves — ordinary families whose extraordinary courage and sacrifice made this country what it is today.
At once a majestic American journey, a significant work of history, and a personal saga reminiscent of bestsellers by Bill Bryson and Cheryl Strayed, The Oregon Trail is an ambitious work of participatory history with a heart as big as the country it crosses.
Praise for The Oregon Trail
“Absorbing….Fundamentally, The Oregon Trail is an adventure story, one in which the Buck brothers find themselves in some legitimately harrowing situations involving cliffs, rivers, runaway mules, and low water supplies in the desert…. The many layers in The Oregon Trail are linked by Mr. Buck’s voice, which is alert and unpretentious in a manner that put me in mind of Bill Bryson’s comic tone in A Walk in the Woods…This shaggy pilgrimage describes a form of happiness sought, and happiness found.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Incredible… Weaving a tale somewhere between a travelogue and a history lesson, Buck traces the iconic path literally and figuratively as he re-creates the great migration with his brother and a Jack Russell terrier.”
—Entertainment Weekly
About the Author
Rinker Buck began his career in journalism at the Berkshire Eagle and was a longtime staff writer for the Hartford Courant.
He has written for Vanity Fair, New York, Life, and many other publications, and his stories have won the Eugene S. Pulliam National Journalism Writing Award and the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award.
He is the author of The Oregon Trail [reserve a copy at Darien Library here] as well as the acclaimed memoirs Flight of Passage and First Job. He lives in northwest Connecticut.
About Darien Library
Darien Library is a Library Journal Five Star Library. The library is among the busiest in the state with over 1,300 people visiting on an average day, the highest per capita circulation in Connecticut, with more than 32 items per resident, and nearly a quarter of a million Wi-Fi and computer uses a year.
The library collection includes 125,000 books and 300 newspaper and magazine subscriptions. In addition, the library presents over 1,500 public events annually, hosting a lineup of bestselling authors, the latest in coding and technology classes, and workshops for small business owners and entrepreneurs.