With Golden Visions Bright Before Them
Trails to the Mining West, 1849-1852
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Narrated by:
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Don Moffit
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By:
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Will Bagley
About this listen
During the mid-19th century, a quarter of a million travelers - men, women, and children - followed the "road across the plains" to gold rush California. This magnificent chronicle - the second installment of Will Bagley's sweeping Overland West series - captures the danger, excitement, and heartbreak of America's first great rush for riches and its enduring consequences. With narrative scope and detail unmatched by earlier histories, With Golden Visions Bright before Them retells this classic American saga through the voices of the people whose eyewitness testimonies vividly evoke the most dramatic era of westward migration.
Traditional histories of the overland roads paint the gold-rush migration as a heroic epic of progress that opened new lands and a continental treasure house for the advancement of civilization. Yet, according to Bagley, the transformation of the American West during this period is more complex and contentious than legend pretends. The gold-rush epoch witnessed untold suffering and sacrifice, and the trails and their trials were enough to make many people turn back. For America's native peoples, the effect of the massive migration was no less than ruinous. The impact that tens of thousands of intruders had on native peoples and their homelands is at the center of this story, not on its margins.
Beautifully written, With Golden Visions Bright before Them continues the saga that began with Bagley's highly acclaimed, award-winning So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812 - 1848, hailed by critics as a classic of western history.
Best Western Nonfiction Historical Book from Western Writers of America. The book is published by University of Oklahoma Press.
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Story
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead a voyage up the Missouri River, across the forbidding Rockies, and - by way of the Snake and the Columbia rivers - down to the Pacific Ocean. Lewis and his partner, Captain William Clark, endured incredible hardships and witnessed astounding sights. With great perseverance, they worked their way into an unexplored West. When they returned two years later, they had long since been given up for dead.
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Narration kills a great book
- By Kindle Customer on 02-10-08
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West Like Lightning
- The Brief, Legendary Ride of the Pony Express
- By: Jim DeFelice
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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The thrilling narrative history of one of the most enduring icons of the American West, the Pony Express, from the number-one New York Times bestselling co-author of American Sniper - an exciting tale of daring young men pushing limits to the extremes across the vast, rugged, and unsettled American West.
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A Picture of Wild West Life and the Pony
- By Pierre C. on 08-07-18
By: Jim DeFelice
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Blood and Thunder
- An Epic of the American West
- By: Hampton Sides
- Narrated by: Don Leslie
- Length: 20 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness.
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Publisher's summary does not do it justice
- By Eric on 02-07-11
By: Hampton Sides
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Thunder in the Mountains
- Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War
- By: Daniel Sharfstein
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 18 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Oliver Otis Howard thought he was a man of destiny. Chosen to lead the Freedmen's Bureau after the Civil War, the Union Army general was entrusted with the era's most crucial task: helping millions of former slaves claim the rights of citizens. He was energized by the belief that abolition and Reconstruction, the country's great struggles for liberty and equality, were God's plan for himself and the nation.
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Interesting but lenghty.
- By Tristan on 05-10-18
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Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands
- A Young Politician's Quest for Recovery in the American West
- By: Roger L. Di Silvestro
- Narrated by: Tristan Morris
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands chronicles the turbulent years Roosevelt spent as a rancher in the Badlands of Dakota Territory, following the sudden deaths on February 14, 1884, of his wife, two days after giving birth, and of his mother. Grief-stricken - and driven by doubts about his career after failed attempts as a reformer fighting political corruption -the young, Harvard-educated New York politician left his infant daughter in his sister's care and went to live on a Badlands ranch he had bought a year earlier.
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Outstanding
- By Buyce Consulting on 04-26-15
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Exploration Fawcett
- Journey to the Lost City of Z
- By: Lt. Col. P. H. Fawcett
- Narrated by: Robin Sachs
- Length: 15 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the true story of the real Colonel Fawcett, whose life was the inspiration for the best-selling book The Lost City of Z and an upcoming movie starring Brad Pitt. A thrilling account, it tells of Colonel Fawcett and his mysterious disappearance in the Amazon jungle, which is now considered one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century.
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boring
- By Ramanda Brockett on 08-07-18
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The Promise of the Grand Canyon
- John Wesley Powell's Perilous Journey and His Vision for the American West
- By: John F. Ross
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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John Wesley Powell’s first descent of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869 counts among the most dramatic chapters in American exploration history. When the Canyon spit out the surviving members of the expedition - starving, battered, and nearly naked - they had accomplished what others thought impossible and finished the exploration of continental America that Lewis and Clark had begun almost 70 years before.
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Parallels
- By Bruce McClenahan on 01-25-19
By: John F. Ross
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The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman
- Women in the West, Book 1
- By: Margot Mifflin
- Narrated by: Kaipo Schwab
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1851, Olive Oatman was a 13-year-old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own.
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Mispronunciations
- By R. Brown on 06-07-18
By: Margot Mifflin
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A Life Wild and Perilous
- Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific
- By: Robert M. Utley
- Narrated by: Richard Davidson
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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If you have ever wondered what is was like to be an explorer in the unspoiled American West of the early 1800s, then this is the audiobook for you. Not only a groundbreaking work of American history by critically acclaimed author Robert M. Utley, A Life Wild and Perilous is also a dramatic story of innovation and survival. Here is your chance to live in the very heart of the American wilderness with legendary trappers and mountain men like Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick, and Jedediah Smith.
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A lot of good history and quite a story too.
- By David on 04-01-12
By: Robert M. Utley
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Into Africa
- The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone
- By: Martin Dugard
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" So goes the signature introduction of New York Herald star journalist Henry Morton Stanley to renowned explorer Dr. David Livingstone, who had been missing for six years in the wilds of Africa. Into Africa ushers us into the meeting of these remarkable men. In 1866, when Livingstone journeyed into the heart of the African continent in search of the Nile's source, the land was rough, unknown to Europeans, and inhabited by man-eating tribes.
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Riveting
- By Gene on 04-01-04
By: Martin Dugard
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Old Man River
- The Mississippi River in North American History
- By: Paul Schneider
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In Old Man River, Paul Schneider tells the story of the river at the center of America's rich history - the Mississippi. Some fifteen thousand years ago, the majestic river provided Paleolithic humans with the routes by which early man began to explore the continent's interior. Since then, the river has been the site of historical significance, from the arrival of Spanish and French explorers in the 16th century to the Civil War. George Washington fought his first battle near the river, and Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman both came to President Lincoln's attention after their spectacular victories on the lower Mississippi.
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Amazing, inspiring and informative
- By Rodney Curlee on 04-27-23
By: Paul Schneider