The drawing above depicts how the Stephenson party may have appeared as they traveled the Oregon Trail west. Though yoked oxen were slower than horses or mules, for pulling loaded wagons or plowing ...

Gregory Crouch’s review of Rinker Buck’s “The Oregon Trail” (Books, Aug. 1) properly emphasizes the superior value of mules versus horses as motive power for hauling covered wagons overland. But a ...

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Forget all those images you’ve seen in movies and on television of wagon trains being pulled by teams of horses. Most of the westward trek by settlers in the 19th century was accomplished, not by ...

At four o'clock in the morning (during the years 1833-37) Joseph Glidden and his son Mark left their home, starting their day of drawing stone from the quarries in Barre to the new state capitol at ...

My absolute favorite thing that happened last week was the arrival of thousands of old MS-DOS games in playable form on the Internet Archive, so in honor of Throwback Thursday, I’m putting that ...

“The ox is a most noble animal, patient, thrifty, durable and gentle.” What an elegant, almost reverential description by Peter Burnett, Oregon Trail traveler of the 1850s! Yet humor and practicality ...

Not everything went off without a hitch for the reopening of the Flying W Ranch, which resumed its chuckwagon dinners and Western serenades Friday after being razed by the Waldo Canyon fire eight ...