Unlock the rich history of our frontier past by supporting our mission to make over 4000 trail diaries, artifacts, maps, and other invaluable research materials accessible to students, researchers, and historians. Currently housed in an inadequate storage facility, these treasures of unresearched primary documents remain out of reach for scholars eager to uncover their secrets.
Your contributions, whether in time or money, are vital to achieving our goal of preserving and digitizing these materials for educational and historical exploration. Join us in bringing these whispers from the past to the forefront of academic discovery!
Step into a world of rare diaries, compelling narratives, and the boundless history of westward migration. Our collection features thousands of original 19th-century trail diaries. The Merrill J. Mattes Research Library is dedicated to preserving the rich history of the overland trails and the exploration and settlement of the American West.
Click below to visit to the Oregon-California Trails Association Merrill J. Mattes Collection online. Here, you have access to many of the original trail diaries he collected in digital form.
Whether you seek academic resources, reading pleasure or avid research, our library is a gateway to limitless possibilities. Explore, discover, and let the pages of our virtual shelves transport you to new horizons of understanding about the largest migration of humans in US history.
