The Appalachian Trail: A Short Story

In the middle of the 19th century, the Oregon Trail was the main pathway for American emigrants who were searching for new lands. While most Oregon bound traveled a route that passed by landmarks, Missouri, Kansas, Wyoming, Nebraska, Idaho, and Oregon there was never one set of wagon ruts leading west. The route was considered too demanding for the women and children or covered wagons to navigate.In 1836 that's when it all changed by Marcus and Narcissa Whitman. BothWhitman, took a small party of wagons from St.Louis to the Walls Valley.In 1843 Marcus Whitman, helped lead the first major wagon train for around 1,000 settlers along the Oregon Trail. In about ten years, 50,000 settlers traveled by the Oregon Trail each year.

This book is told from the diary of the main character, Sam Gribley. Sam is a boy full of determination. He didn’t give up and go home like everyone thought he would. He is strong of mind. After the first night in the freezing rain, with no fire and no food, he still went on. He is a born survivor. He lasted the winter, through storms, hunger, and loneliness, and came out on top even when everyone expected him to fail. “The land is no place for a Gribley” p. 9

For those seeking a secluded mountain home there would be none better than Appalachian Mountain real estate, as the starting point.

”The impossible is doable as long as you have a great brother and good trails friends. Uncertainty is all. Crazyass passion is the staple of life and persistence its nourishing force. Without them, you cannot cross the trail” (416).

Approximately 20,000 people died while traveling on the Oregon Trail. Which took place in the mid 1840s, when Americans started seeking economic success by moving westward. The justification for the expansion was due to weakness in the Mexican government and economy. Since Americans regarded Mexicans as inferior, despite the statement, made by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, that “All men are created equal”, many of the citizens thought that the Mexican citizens did not deserve to keep their lands. America was not justified in its western expansion due to the lack of morality behind putting one person’s comfort above the safety of another.

This topic the Oregon Trail deals with all these people were looking for a better life or some freedom to practice their religion for themselves along with their families. Saw that they needed to move somewhere else and many of them decided to move west and take the Oregon trail or move to the state of California. Even though they knew it wasn't easy there was many trails that they had to go threw. They decided to take on that idea to leave for the Oregon trail.

The Appalachian Trail was also the product of a daydream atop Stratton Mountain, the brainchild of Benton MacKaye. MacKaye was an off-and-on federal employee, educated as a forester and self-trained as a planner, who proposed it as the connecting thread of "a project in regional planning." His proposal, drawing on years of talk of a "master trail" within New England hiking circles, was written at the urging of concerned friends in the months after his suffragette-leader wife killed herself. It appeared in the October 1921 edition of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, at the time a major organ the regional-planning movement. MacKaye envisioned a trail along the ridge-crests of the Appalachian

In Uneven Ground, the author Ronald D. Eller narrates the economic, political, and social change of Appalachia after World War II. He writes “persistent unemployment and poverty set Appalachia off as a social and economic problem area long before social critic Michael Harrington drew attention to the region as part of the “other America” in 1962.”(pp.2) Some of the structural problems stated by Eller include problems of land abuse, political corruption, economic shortsightedness, and the loss of community and culture; personally view the economic myopia as being the most daunting.

For the next forty years, hundreds of thousands of people will move westward. From 1830 to 1840 people from the East moved to the West. Many of these people started on the Oregon Trail, that started in Independence, Missouri and ended in Willamette Valley in Oregon. Hundreds of Thousands of people moved west for the new land grant, which if you were a full Indian, or half Indian and eighteen or older you could have three-hundred and twenty acres of land for free. If you were married, you would get six-hundred and forty acres of land. For people that lived in the East, this land was practically gold. There are two other trails that need some recognition also, the Mormon Trail and the California Trail. All three trails started in Independence,

Before settlers began to move to Oregon it had already been inhabited. Native Americans lives in Oregon this was their homeland. With the Study of Oregon, anthropologists had come to the conclusion that as many as 180,000 natives had lived in Oregon long before Europeans began to arrive. Therefore as the Oregon Trail became more popular and more people pushed west it brought an uprising of conflicts between pioneers and Native Americans. This interest in the west began with in 1803.

If you look at early Appalachian history, many of the earliest settlers in the mountains were of Irish decent. Their ancestors had originally migrated to northeastern America to escape religious persecution and eventually made their way south to the Appalachian Mountains, which they preferred because the area was similar in climate and geographic features to Ireland. Early settlers in the mountains had a Paganistic belief system and because of the geographic location of their settlements, were isolated from the outside world. In the early 1900s there weren’t roads, railroads, paths, etc. to travel into the mountains, which socially isolated groups living in those areas.

The novel Across a Hundred Mountains by Reyna Grande is a story about two young girls and their struggling journey to find happiness between two conflicting and distinct worlds: the United States and Mexico. Juana on one side wants to get to the United States, or “el otro lado” as mentioned in the novel, to find her father who abandoned her and her mother after leaving to find work in the US. On the other hand Adelina escapes from her house in California to follow her lover to Mexico. The girls form a bond in the most unexpected of places, a Tijuana jail, and quickly form a friendship that will connect them for the rest of their lives.

Pennsylvania is a state situated in the middle-Atlantic regions and north eastern part of United States. The Appalachian Mountains passes in the middle of Pennsylvania. It is the sixth densely populated, 33rd largest and 6th known state from 50 united states. It is one of original 13 colonies, William Penn was the one founded Pennsylvania as a haven for his associated Quakers. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania capital, was the location of the both first and the second Continental Congresses in the year 1774 and 1775, the end of which brought the Announcement of Independence, leading to the American Revolution. Pennsylvania became the second state after the war, where Delaware was the first, to approve the United States Constitution. Pennsylvania

The Trail written by Meika Hashimoto is set in modern-day Velvet Rocks New Hampshire to Katahdin Maine. The point of view is first person because on the first page the book it says, “out in the woods, all by myself, I’ve become aware of the little things. There are the good littles: cooling my face with a handful of water from a mountain stream. The way sunlight plays through wind-rippled leaves. The started leap of a deer that only I see.”

They were on their morning walk through the endless trails and old dirt paths that twisted and turned until you saw no end. The trails were covered with fresh snow stacked upon autumn’s forgotten leaves that were never bothered to be picked up. Walking into the woods, holding his gun with an old torn red flannel tee on, Jason has doubts that this might be his last season. Charlie was already climbing down the hillside, straying off the trails, and hoping of making the first kill to prove his worthiness to his owner. Jason calls back to Charlie, “Come ‘mere ol’ boy, don’t start without me!” and they begin their way quietly trudging through the dense woods to their special spot. They continue down the beaten path until Jason and Charlie come to a clearing in the woods where the only drops of sun come down through the dead leaves that have yet to fall. Here Jason pulls out a decaying tarp and sets up base camp. From camp, you can see all the rolling hillsides slope down into one large snake like river flowing through the mountains until it is lost in the distance. The Tennessee mountains are a treacherous terrain filled with steep drop offs and deadly trails. One can easily become lost and lose all sense of direction. Clutching his compass in one hand, Jason is prepared to stay the whole winter.