-- The Oregon Trail A modern-day Huck Finn, Buck casts off down the river on the flatboat -- Patience As a historian, Buck resurrects the era's adventurous spirit, but he also challenges familiar myths about American expansion, confronting the bloody truth behind settlers' push for land and wealth. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced more than 125,000 members of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and several other tribes to travel the Mississippi on a brutal journey en route to the barrens of Oklahoma. Simultaneously, almost a million enslaved African Americans were carried in flatboats and marched by foot 1,000 miles over the Appalachians to the cotton and cane fields of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, birthing the term 'sold down the river.' Buck portrays this watershed era of American expansion as it was really lived. With a rare narrative power that blends stirring adventure with absorbing untold history, -- is a mus-cular and majestic feat of storytelling from a writer who may be the closest that we have today to Mark Twain.