A Family’s Tale from Scotland to Oregon

(PRWEB) December 18, 2009 -- Oregon author, Ted W. Cox, took four years to carefully research and write his newest book “Murray Loop: Journey of an Oregon Family 1808-1949,” using letters and diaries and including many historic photos and maps.

Murray Loop is an absorbing story of a family displaced as feudal tenant farmers who in desperation leave Scotland and seek a better life on the American continent. The history threads together five generations while they move on a 5,000-mile journey from Scotland to Oregon’s central coast.

There are surprising detours along the way. The family, who were 19th century social activists, spent 35 years in Midwestern Utopian communities that embraced radicalism, free thought, free love, and the Underground Railroad.

In addition to giving an intimate look at the relationship of the various family members, the book is also a solid history text, with insights into the plight of Native Americans caught in the conflict of the Oregon Territorial Act of 1848, which acknowledged Indian possession of the land, and the Donation Land Act of 1850, which opened the land to settlement by whites.

Murray Loop is a compelling family portrait illuminating a larger American story: the movement of Europeans across the Atlantic and westward in the relentless quest for a better life. Read this book, it is a professionally written, thoroughly researched and attractively presented chronicle of an American family.

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