''The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants on the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–60'' is a book on overland travel across the

Great Plains The Great Plains (french: Grandes Plaines), sometimes simply "the Plains", is a broad expanse of flatland in North America. It is located west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, an ...

prior to the Civil War. It was written by John D. Unruh, Jr. and first published by the

University of Illinois Press The University of Illinois Press (UIP) is an American university press and is part of the University of Illinois system. Founded in 1918, the press publishes some 120 new books each year, plus 33 scholarly journals, and several electronic project ...

in 1979. The book was a revised doctoral dissertation written at the University of Kansas under George L. Anderson and Clifford S. Griffin. It covers mainly the

Oregon Oregon () is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of it ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, and

Mormon Mormons are a religious and cultural group related to Mormonism, the principal branch of the Latter Day Saint movement started by Joseph Smith in upstate New York during the 1820s. After Smith's death in 1844, the movement split into several ...

Trails.

Chapters

:Introduction: The Historians and the Overlanders :1. Public Opinion, 1840-48 :2. Public Opinion, 1849-60 :3. Motivations and Beginnings :4. Emigrant Interaction :5. Emigrant-Indian Interaction :6. The Federal Government :7. Private Entrepreneurs, 1840-49 :8. Private Entrepreneurs, 1850-60 :9. The Mormon "Halfway House" :10. West Coast Assistance :11. The Overlanders in Historical Perspective.

Evaluations

The evaluations by professional historians had been highly favorable. Wilbur Jacobs says:

This volume is unquestionably a major contribution, a tour de force, in the corpus of scholarship on the American West. Any careful reader cannot help but be impressed with the author's persistence in sifting a massive data base to bring us an original, revisionist study on a subject that has occupied generations of able historians of the frontier. Although there is a wealth of detail on almost every one of its five hundred pages, the book still has clarity of style, and a meaningful argument in interpreting the facts.

Martin Ridge says:

Unruh read the secondary literature from anthologies to pot boilers, combed the newspapers of the great era of the trail-1840-1860-for accounts and perceptions of the West, and analyzed more than ten score diaries, both published and unpublished. Conflicting statements were reconciled; numerical data were corrected; and reminiscences were tested against facts-all with revisionist results, for myths tumble like ten pins in Unruh's retelling of the trail narrative. The nature of Indian-white contact, for example, is less a tale of violence and theft on the plains and more a case of cooperation and assistance by the tribes and diffidence and abuse by whites, especially in the 1840s. Indian violence shrinks in scale as does, for that matter, the level of violence in general within Unruh's double decade paradigm....In all, Unruh concludes, there were more Indians killed by whites than whites killed by Indians.

Earl Pomeroy says:

His great themes are that emigration was more significantly collective process than individual adventure and that from year to year emigrants depended in- creasingly on the help and experience of others.Earl Pomeroy in ''The Journal of American History,'' Vol. 67, No. 2 (Sep., 1980), pp. 403-404

Editions

*Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1979. LoC 78-9781. *

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Plains Across 1979 non-fiction books History books about the American Old West Santa Fe Trail Oregon Trail University of Illinois Press books