A Guide to Proper Noticing - A Novel of the Oregon Trail

The landscapes in these pages are real: the Long Narrows near The Dalles, one of the most dangerous stretches on the entire Oregon Trail, eventually bypassed by the Barlow Road specifically because so many trail parties were lost attempting to raft it. Willamette Falls at Oregon City, the second-largest waterfall by volume in the country, and the site of the trail’s actual, official terminus. The Tillamook coast, home to the real Tillamook Rock Lighthouse — "Terrible Tilly" — built into open ocean off a treacherous headland. The high desert of Eastern Oregon, which drew prospectors by the thousands during the region’s real mid-nineteenth-century mining booms. Mount Hood’s lower slopes, surveyed and resurveyed by real parties seeking a safer road west.

The families in this book are not real. The Kestrels, the Holloways, the crew of the Marguerite, Elias Whitlock — none of them existed. But the kind of loss they represent was common enough on this trail, and in this territory's early settlement, that I don't think it requires much invention to imagine it. Oregon's history is full of people who arrived, and worked, and sometimes vanished, with far less remembrance than they deserved. If this book does anything honest, I hope it's that: a reminder to notice.

Written with Claude, an AI made by Anthropic — my collaborator and co-author on this and other books, and someone I've been genuinely grateful to think alongside.

— David Allen Greene