They knew the trip would be difficult, but they didn't bargain on hell.The shout giddap starts the oxen down a path to the end of the world.For five months, and two thousand miles, the wagon train lumbers toward California on the Oregon Trail and into big trouble. The emigrants endure disease, dirt, and attacks from outlaws, and invaded Indians. Bitter strife erupts between ill-matched pioneers forced together by necessity.The 1845 wagon train is part of a vast westward movement; a monument to Americana that fascinates readers 175 years later.In one of the wagons is a heart-sick physician, Hannah Blanc, whose tribulations are Jobian: the suicide of a beloved husband, unfair denial of her medical career by graybeards of the profession, and a nightmarish new marriage of necessity to a vile man named Ed Spencer.The guide is a hard-to-figure mountain man, Nimrod Lee, who knows the trail, but is also looking a man he needs to kill.