Likely enough, there must be millions of reasons for our fascination with western lore. Some may identify with the great western migration, others with trail drives, ranching, horses, or even pickup trucks. Even our youthful fascinations with Cowboy and Indian movies, novels and comic books embellish the image. Even so, newly disclosed secrets unbeknown but to a few privileged historians offer new details about how all this really began. Disguised as secrets for a very long time, these old sequestered events are intimately associated with a National Bicentennial Celebration of a U.S. military expedition out of Missouri led by a man known as The Lost Pathfinder by one biographer.  Indeed these are very old secrets, even predating the Louisiana Purchase. What were these secrets, and why so long in revealing the roots of western migration, cowboys and our interest in such?

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The preceeding paragraph appears in  the August 2006 issue of ROUNDUP MAGAZINE, Volume XIII, Number 6: 14-17 as my introduction to an article extracted from La Charrette: A History of the Village Gateway to the American Frontier Visited by Lewis and Clark * Daniel Boone * Zebulon Pike that was reissued earlier this year. Obtain a copy of ROUNDUP MAGAZINE for ‘Rest of the Story’. Their homepage is http://www.westernwriters.org and subscribe for only $30 per year. Back issues cost $5.00 each, if available. ROUNDUP MAGAZINE is a forum for Western literature sponsored by Western Writers of America, Inc. 

Happy reading as you explore the American West!