America turned to its own “camel of the prairie” to expand west—not a humped animal that could withstand the desert, as we normally think of camels, but a small wooden wagon that carried some 400,000 people west between 1843-70.
To this day, the romance of the wagon train lives on, and several outfitters offer wagon train vacations. But read any book about the reality of westward emigration, and you’ll discover there wasn’t much romance in those small wagons that held every precious
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