Saving the Oregon Trail: Ezra Meeker's Last Grand Quest by Dennis M. Larsen

Reviewed by: Saving the Oregon Trail: Ezra Meeker's Last Grand Quest by Dennis M. Larsen B. J. Hollars Saving the Oregon Trail: Ezra Meeker's Last Grand Quest. By Dennis M. Larsen. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 2020. 278 pages. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $28.95 paper. In his fourth and final installment of Ezra Meeker's biography, retired history teacher and trail scholar Dennis M. Larsen provides a meticulously researched account of Meeker's final decades—an era in which the Oregon Trail's most enthusiastic advocate stopped at nothing to memorialize the trail for future generations. Beginning with Meeker's 1901 return to Puyallup, Washington, following a stint in the Yukon, Larsen traces Meeker's various attempts to preserve the trail's legacy, most notably by the emigrant's retracing the same trail that he had first traveled half a century prior. While Meeker's unflagging commitment to trail preservation served as one motivation for his later-in-life trips, paying off his creditors was another. Meeker's entrepreneurial spirit was admirable, though not always successful. His many failed ventures all but demanded that he embark upon his perpetual roadshow of lecturing, peddling postcards, and continually raising funds for both trail monuments and his own preservation. Meeker's many ill-fated business dealings relied upon a revolving door of financiers, some of whom lost confidence in Meeker as the years passed. But Meeker never lost faith in himself and, in the end, his near-megalomaniacal attempts to preserve the legacy of the Oregon Trail proved successful. Though the book occasionally veers into minutiae—providing pages of details when a footnote might do—it could be argued that every detail helps shape Meeker's story, which [End Page 271] is nuanced, complex, and well told in Larsen's capable hands. The result is an evenhanded account of a man neither heroized nor vilified. And a man who, in his later years, appeared to be caught between two eras: simultaneously holding fast to a fading past while propelling the Oregon Trail's story into the future by way of monuments and motion pictures. As Larsen makes clear, Ezra Meeker was many things: eccentric, charismatic, stubborn, spirited, savvy, persuasive, and indefatigable most of all. The man wore many hats, even if some fit better than others. In his final assessment, Larsen lauds Meeker for his "willingness to take risks and embrace the new," as well as his "boundless capacity for work," and his "unrelenting competitive drive . . . strict moral compass, and . . . unerring vision of the future." Indeed, Meeker was all these and more. For a man who so dutifully preserved Oregon Trail history for the rest of us, it is only fitting we preserve Meeker's memory, too. B. J. Hollars Department of English University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

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