What was it like to cross a continent in a covered wagon? Emigrant Road - An Oregon Trail Adventure follows in the footsteps of the pioneers and visits trail sites as they exist today. The eighty-minute live presentation features narration by filmmaker James R. Tompkins, who spent years researching diaries, journals and letters of Oregon Trail emigrants.

The travelogue traces the historic nineteenth-century wagon road from Independence, Missouri, through Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington to its end at Oregon City, near Portland, Oregon.

Much of the trail can still be rediscovered by tourists. “Many of the same sites that the pioneers wrote about in their journals still exist today,” Tompkins said. “You can go out there and stand in the same ruts and see the same open country they saw.” Highlights of the film include a wagon train crossing the Snake River, a boat ride to hidden springs, prairie thunderstorms, mountain crossings, “and a visit to ‘The City of Roses,’” Tompkins added. Mr. Tompkins has presented travelogues in person all over the country, among them appearances at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. and the SunDome in Phoenix.

Pioneer journals tell of the hardships and triumphs of crossing the two-thousand-mile-long “Emigrant Road,” as they called it. “There are so many great stories,” Tompkins says. “Edwin Bryant, for example, wrote of the whole circle of life he saw, and about how the pioneers just kept moving onward. ‘A death and a funeral,’ he wrote, ‘a wedding and a birth, had occurred in this wilderness, within a diameter of two miles and within two hours’ time; and tomorrow, the places where these events had taken place would be deserted and unmarked.’”

“Many stories tell of the magnificent beauty they saw,” Tompkins relates, “and I try to share that in the film. Francis Parkman observed, ‘a bright streak of clear red sky appeared above the western verge of the prairie, the horizontal rays of the sun streamed through it, and glittered in a thousand prismatic colors….’ They called it an ‘enchanted land,’” Tompkins said.

“The amazing thing is that there is so much of it still left to see. Wagon tracks from 150 years ago are still visible on the high desert plains of Wyoming. Signatures carved on Independence Rock still look fresh. And original diaries which have never been published can still be found.”

“I was lucky enough to have a copy of one such diary along with me on my own trip over the Oregon Trail. When I stopped at places like Chimney Rock and Ash Hollow, I took out his diary and read his words, and compared them with what I was seeing. It was a unique experience to stand in the footsteps of someone who was there 150 years before me. And to cover the same distance, over 2,000 miles east to west, gave me a sense of their struggle I could never get anywhere else.”

“Although I don’t have any ancestors who went over the trail, I was the first one in my family to move west. I love learning about the history of places and about the people who lived there. The history of the Oregon Trail is filled with so many interesting stories of the adventures the pioneers had on the frontier, I found it very hard to resist making a film about it. So, I made it as my first travelogue film. And when you make this type of a film by yourself as I did, then it becomes a very personal journey.” A personal journey Mr. Tompkins shares with those who come to see Emigrant Road - An Oregon Trail Adventure.