" read The Way West because I was lucky enough to find it -- you can see it's an old book -- I was lucky enough to find it at a book sale. It was published in 1949, which I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, but I remember that it won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie.
The Way West is about traveling west on a wagon train in the mid-1800's when the west was just opening. It was full of terrors. There were no trains to get there, no stagecoaches yet; the only way to do it was to either be a mountain man and know the trails or to go on a wagon train. I myself am the descendant of someone who was born in a wagon train. My great grandmother on my mother's side was born on the Oregon Trail, and her parents were killed by Indians. She was raised by her brothers, and they made it all the way to Oregon. And A.B. Guthrie, who wrote this book, his family -- he and his family really did travel west; so he knew what he was talking about, and it really rings true. It's not romanticized, and it's not flat. It has all the depth of difficulties and conflicts that human beings in a group would encounter.
I would recommend the book to anyone who is interested in the past of this country and what it was really like -- not what it's like when it's cleaned up, or what it's simplified, or when it's stereotyped on TV, but what it was like through the eyes of someone who pretty much lived in the frontier days. I'd give it a five. It's definitely -- The Way West is a five. It should have won the Pulitzer Prize that year; it's just only right that it did. It's a standout in American writing about the west; and the brilliance of its style, the depth of the characters, the fact that the author is able even to -- he writes sometimes about little kids, sometimes about teens, sometimes men, sometimes women, and they all ring true as real people."
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