In the summer of 1819, Alexander Campbell and his family and their servants, along with other travelers, departed from the comparative comfort of their home in Highland County, Virginia, to set forth on a pio-neering trek to the wilderness country of the Missouri Territory. James Brown Campbell, the family's eldest son, then only twenty years of age, began keeping a diary of their journey, recounting their terrible hardships, both on the way and after arriving in the "Promised Land," plus a detailed account of his work surveying parts of Missouri Territory, and...