Excerpt from The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The map, the hypnotic Flint Hills rising and falling all around me, the peaceful surroundings of the ranch, seemed an invitation to ramble. Who wouldn't, given the chance, want to ride the trail end to end? Wanderlust has always acted like amphetamine for me and I could not prevent my head from making the next leap.

St. Joe to Farewell Bend in Oregon in a covered wagon. More than two thousand miles of open country to cross. What a dream.

"So, in other words," I said to Duane, "somebody could still do it. The whole trail."

Duane looked at me quizzically, as if I were asking a question that he'd never heard before. The modern trail, he explained, mostly existed as a tourist attraction. Families driving west in their RVs—headed for Yellowstone or Glacier National Park—stopped out of curiosity when they saw signs identifying Oregon Trail sites. Most of them just wanted to quickly read a brochure and then find the next campsite with a cable TV hookup.

"But you could do it," I said. "The trail is still there."

"In theory, yeah, I suppose," Duane said. "But it isn't going to happen."

After poking around the grounds and the Pony Express station for a while, I stepped back inside to say good-bye to Duane, and then hiked back east across the rise. The words of Margaret Frink had stayed with me, and I stopped at the top to look back. It was tempting to look across the hills to Nebraska and imagine long trains of white-topped wagons for many miles, with men hollering at teams, whips cracking, and hundreds of wheels raising dust, while outriders galloped through the grasses to flush up game. At this time of day the river bottoms all the way to Nebraska would be obscured by gray clouds of smoke, as the pioneers stopped their trains for the night and cooked deer steaks and prairie chickens for their evening meal. But the plains were quiet now, the air crystalline. The cedar roofs of the Hollenberg Ranch, lit pink and amber by the falling sun, were all that I could see.

It was almost dark by the time I got back to my car. Dusk is my favorite part of the day, a time for expansive thoughts, and as I drove south my mind wandered back over the ruts and the vision of a journey that I had seen on a map at the Hollenberg Ranch. I dreamed about it all the way back to Topeka. Buy a team of mules and a covered wagon, jump off from St. Joe, and then spend an endless summer rusticating way out there, revived all day by the clangor of harness chains, the scent of mules sweating, and the vast soulful horizons of the West. I would camp at night at old pioneer stops and Pony Express corrals, soothed by the rushing waters as I fell asleep beside the Sweetwater or the Platte.

It was a completely lunatic notion. Except for the occasional faux reenactments staged for tourists by Wyoming outfitters—modern-day "pioneers" are trailed by convoys of sumptuously appointed RVs, and pampered at night with portable showers and catered meals—no one traveled more than sixty or seventy miles of the trail today. I would later read, in a history of the trail years and the subsequent homesteading period in the late nineteenth century, that "the last documented crossing of the trail occurred in 1909." Just to reach my rendezvous with dementia out along the banks of the Missouri River, I would spend two or three days driving west from my home in New England with my gear loaded into a pickup. Then I would spend four months, via covered wagon and mules, crossing what nineteenth-century travelers called the "Great American Desert." Across the high deserts of central Wyoming and Idaho, I would have to cover stretches of forty miles or more without water. And why did I think that the notorious and often fatal obstacles that the pioneers faced—mountain passes strewn with lava rock, hellacious winds and dust storms, rattlesnakes, and descents so steep that the wagons could only be lowered by ropes—would miraculously vanish from the trail for me? Only a delusional jackass, or someone seriously off his medications, would pull off the road at the Hollenberg Ranch one fine summer afternoon and concoct such a preposterous scheme.

Excerpted from The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck. Copyright © 2015 by Rinker Buck. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.