Books by LeRoy R. Hafen

To weary travelers on the Oregon Trail during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Fort Laramie was a welcome sight. Its walls and flag-decked towers rose from the high plains, their solidity suggesting that the white man was gaining a toehold in the wilderness.Hafen and Young present the colorful history of Fort Laramie from its establishment as Fort John in 1834 to its abandonment in 1890. Early on, the fort was controlled by the American Fur Company and patronized by trappers like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson. Then it was a vital supply center and rest stop for a tide of emigrants--missionaries, Mormons, forty-niners, and homeseekers.As more wagons rolled west and the Pony Express came through, the need for protection increased; in 1849, Fort Laramie was converted from a trapper's post into a military fort. Down through the years there were skirmishes with the Plains Indians, who sometimes came to the fort to barter and to treat. The peace council of 1851—one of the largest gatherings of tribes ever seen in the Old West—is here described in fascinating detail.The cast of characters in this great historical pageant reads like a who's who of the American West.

A collection of Pike's Peak gold rush diaries chronicling the struggles, dreams, and heartaches of those who traveled the overland routes to untold riches. The diarists who came along the Arkansas and Platte Rivers and along trails from Texas, Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois created records of the landscapes and people they encountered.

A history that is filled with colorful pathmarkers like Jedediah Smith, John C Fremont, and Kit Carson; with packers, home seekers, and mail couriers; and with horse thieves and enslavers of Indian women and children.

Thomas Fitzpatrick was a trapper and a trailblazer who became the head of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. With Jedediah Smith he led the trapper band that discovered South Pass; he then shepherded the first two emigrant wagon trains to Oregon, was official guide to Fremont on his longest expedition. This title tells about his life.

John Jacob Astor's dream of empire took shape as the American Fur Company. At Astor's retirement in 1834, this corporate monopoly reached westward from a depot on Mackinac Island to subposts beyond the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. This book focuses on eighteen men who represented the American Fur Company and its successors.

It is unparalleled in history, the procession of Latter-Day Saints pushing handcarts from Iowa City and Florence (Omaha) to their promised Zion by the Great Salt Lake. The migration is described in Handcarts to Zion, which draws on diaries and reports of the participants, rosters of the ten companies, and a collection of the songs sung on the trail.