From the famed Oregon Trail to the boardwalks of Dodge City to the great trading posts on the Missouri River to the battlefields of the nineteenth-century Indian Wars, there are places all over the American West where visitors can relive the great Western migration that helped shape our history and culture. This guide to the states Along the Mississippi, including Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota--one of the five-volume Finding the Wild West series--highlights the best preserved historic sites as well as ghost towns, reconstructions, museums, historical markers, statues, works of public art that tell the story of the Old West. Use this book in planning your next trip and for a storytelling overview of America's Wild West history.

Mike Cox is the author of more than thirty nonfiction books and hundreds of newspaper articles, columns, magazine stories, and essays for a wide variety of regional and national publications. When not writing, he spends as much time as he can traveling, fishing, hunting, and looking for new stories to tell. He lives in the Hill Country village of Wimberley, Texas.