Ezra Meeker

Born in Ohio in 1830, Ezra Meeker crossed the Oregon Trail with his family in 1852 and eventually settled in what became Puyallup, Washington. He first made his mark as a successful hop grower and businessman, then reinvented himself as a writer and public advocate for pioneer memory.

Meeker is best remembered for his late-life campaigns to mark and memorialize the Oregon Trail. In his seventies and beyond, he retraced the route by ox team and later by automobile, gathering attention for the trail's history and for the people who had traveled it. That mix of firsthand experience and showmanlike energy gave his writing a vivid, personal quality.

His books are valuable not because they are detached histories, but because they come straight from someone who helped shape the world he describes. Readers interested in westward migration, frontier settlement, and the making of regional legend will find in Meeker a lively and unusually direct voice from the 19th-century American West.