01Summary
The Oregon Trail was a roughly 2,170-mile wagon route running from the Missouri River, most often from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley in present-day western Oregon. Between 1841 and 1869, an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 emigrants used some portion of the trail to settle the Pacific Northwest, the Great Basin, or the California gold fields.
The trail was not a single track but a braid of routes. From the Missouri it followed the Platte River west across the Great Plains, climbed the gentle saddle of South Pass through the Rocky Mountains, threaded the Snake River canyons, and finally dropped through the Blue Mountains and the Columbia River Gorge to Oregon City.
Friday, May 18. On the Plat. Made 18 miles. Saw the elephant for the first time.
02Etymology & name
The name Oregon appears in print as early as 1765 in a petition by Major Robert Rogers, who applied it to a great river of the West that no European had yet seen. Its origin is uncertain. Theories range from a corruption of the Algonquian wauregan ("beautiful") to a Spanish reference to the marjoram plant oregano.
Set two diary entries from the same week side by side, Sallie Hester next to Esther Hanna, say. What does each one notice or skip? The gaps usually say more about the diarist than the entries themselves do.
03Origins (1740-1840)
The trail was not built. It was worn in. Native peoples, the Pawnee, Lakota, Shoshone, Cayuse, and Nez Perce, had moved across the same passes, fords, and high prairies for centuries before any wagon. From 1811, fur traders for John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company stitched together the first transcontinental route as far as the mouth of the Columbia. Their pilot Robert Stuart found South Pass in 1812, the gentle Wyoming saddle that would later make wagons possible.
By the 1830s, missionary families like the Whitmans and Spaldings had pushed the route further still, demonstrating in 1836 that a wagon could be coaxed (with much sawing and dismantling) as far as Fort Hall. Four years later, in 1840, mountain men Robert Newell and Joseph Meek drove three wagons all the way through to Fort Walla Walla on the Columbia. The way was open.
04The emigration era
The first organized wagon train left Missouri in 1841. The Bartleson-Bidwell Party of about seventy men, women, and children divided in present-day Idaho, half pushing on for California, half for Oregon. By 1843, a single wagon train known as the "Great Migration" carried roughly 1,000 settlers in one season. The trail had become a national project.
05Route & geography
From Independence, the trail crossed the Kansas River, picked up the Platte at Fort Kearny, and followed the river's broad, shallow valley west for nearly six hundred miles, past Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff, to Fort Laramie, the trail's first major waypoint. From Laramie it climbed steadily over the high plains to South Pass and the Continental Divide.
West of the divide the trail forked. The Oregon-bound went north-west through Fort Hall on the Snake, the California-bound south through the Humboldt Sink. The Oregon route then followed the Snake's canyons, climbed the Blue Mountains, and finally dropped down the Columbia River Gorge to Oregon City.
06Wagons & equipment
The standard emigrant wagon was the prairie schooner, a flat-bedded farm wagon with hickory bows hooped over it and a duck-canvas cover stretched on top. It was lighter and smaller than the better-known Conestoga of the eastern roads. A loaded schooner carried roughly a ton of provisions. Pulled by three or four yoke of oxen, it travelled twelve to fifteen miles on a good day.
The hubs are coming off our wagons every few days. We have to be content to make ten miles.
07Daily life
Most emigrants walked. Riding inside a loaded wagon, over rutted ground, was tiring for the team and beating to the body. A typical day began at four in the morning, on the march by seven, halted at noon, and pushed on until six. Women cooked over fires of buffalo chips. Children gathered the chips, drove livestock, and watched their younger siblings.
Sundays were a divisive day. Many trains stopped, to wash clothes, repair wagons, hold services. Others pushed through, anxious about the season. Arguments over Sabbath travel could split a company in two.
08Hazards & mortality
Very roughly one emigrant in fifteen died on the trail. The causes were rarely the dramatic ones popular memory remembers. Cholera was the deadliest threat, since a single bad water source could kill dozens in a day, and it was worst in the years of the heaviest traffic. Drowning at river crossings, accidental shootings, and wagon accidents together killed thousands more.
09Native nations & the trail
Despite a century of dime-novel cliché, fewer than 4% of recorded emigrant deaths involved conflict with Native peoples. Trade was far more common than violence. Emigrant diaries record purchases of fish, horses, and information, and acts of guidance through difficult country. The trail's pressure on the buffalo herds and the grass, and the treaties that followed, would have far heavier consequences for the nations whose lands it crossed.
10Decline & legacy
The trail's working life ended in 1869 with the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad, which made the same trip possible in seven days and in a railway car. Its legacy, however, persisted: in the demographic make-up of the Pacific Northwest, in the broken-up sovereignty of the Plains nations, and in the literature and mythology of the American West.
11In popular culture
The Oregon Trail's most influential modern adaptation is the educational computer game first developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and rewritten and expanded by MECC through the 1980s and 1990s. The 1990 MECC release, the version most readers will remember, introduced a generation of students to the trail and to the words "you have died of dysentery."