Based on their extensive research into personal accounts of the Oregon Trail, comic authors David Lasky and Frank Young have created a graphic narrative of one family's epic journey. The main character is an 11-year-old girl whose family sets course for the West to seek new opportunities and to escape the eastern city where they had been living. Oregon Trail reveals all of the planning, equipment, and logistics that went into traveling across an untamed continent in the 1800s. In addition to its visualization of the family's journey, the book features a series of two-page spreads detailing a visual inventory of everything the family took with them, including the parts of a covered wagon and a personally annotated map of the trail. Readers get a ground-level feel for what it was like to be part of this storied migration west-not a dry recitation of dates and facts, but an immediately memorable living history.