Before the invention of the tractor, farmers and others in professions who had heavy hauling or pulling chores to do chose working cattle (better known as oxen) for the job. When settlers started ...

The drawing above depicts how the Stephenson party may have appeared as they traveled the Oregon Trail west. Though yoked oxen were slower than horses or mules, for pulling loaded wagons or plowing ...

Forget all those images you’ve seen in movies and on television of wagon trains being pulled by teams of horses. Most of the westward trek by settlers in the 19th century was accomplished, not by ...

At four o'clock in the morning (during the years 1833-37) Joseph Glidden and his son Mark left their home, starting their day of drawing stone from the quarries in Barre to the new state capitol at ...

Gregory Crouch’s review of Rinker Buck’s “The Oregon Trail” (Books, Aug. 1) properly emphasizes the superior value of mules versus horses as motive power for hauling covered wagons overland. But a ...