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Title: A Trail to Nowhere
Review: Life on the Santa Fe Trail was no doubt dramatic and colorful, but you would not know it from this book. More than 300 pages of stitched together factual recitations and short anecdotes, the narrative lacks any central characters, themes, or ideas. None of the individuals featured in the book survives more than a few pages, and just as a story starts to draw in the reader, it ends, only to be followed by another quite similar episode, and another and another. Great events dominate the times, but the book seems to separate life on the trail from those events, making the trail itself seem to be almost boring, which it surely was not. The largest contribution this book can hope to make is to point another writer to promising source material with which to bring the story of this trail to life.
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