On the Western Trails: The Overland Diaries of Washington Peck

A cooper and farmer from Ontario, Canada, Washington Peck (1801–89) spent decades traveling across the western frontier before finally settling in Washington Territory. Peck’s chronicle of his itinerant life offers fresh insight into some of the less traveled emigrant routes across the nineteenth—century West.

Peck left two wagon—train diaries—published here for the first time—that log western routes not often recorded: an 1850–51 trip to the California gold fields via the Platte River Road–...