Oregon Trail
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I’m deep into old words these days — Gold Rush and Victorian-era slang, 19th century dictionaries and troves of etymology treasure. I lost an entire afternoon to Merriam-Webster’s fantastic Time Traveler the other day. It sorts words by the first year they were used in print, whether it’s 1613 (alimony, dungaree) or 2025 (vibe coding).…
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Nineteenth-century fort? Gold Rush ghost town? Historical museum straddling the Platte River in Nebraska? I’m so there. The Platte River is striking, a braided river whose waterways eddy and surge around willow-dotted islands and sandbars some 310 miles, with a tributary — the North Platte River — that takes the river’s entire length to more…
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Reading through hundreds of Oregon Trail diaries at the Merrill J. Mattes Research Library at the National Frontier Trails Museum in Independence, Missouri — as well as online and in published volumes back home — one thing kept hitting me. Nearly every diary entry noted how many miles the journal keeper had traveled that day.…
Jackie Burrell, Writer 