The Lost Wagon by Jim Kjelgaard

Why would a farmer exchange his plowed fields for a wilderness? Why would a husband and father take his family from civilization into an untamed land? In the middle of the last century, thousands of Americans pushed westward into the unknown--and Joe Tower, who had never been fifty miles from his birthplace, was one of them. TH LOST WAGON tells the gripping, warmly human story of why he ventured along the Oregon Trail and of how he and his family met its hazards....