§ Glossary

The trail had its own vocabulary.

Words drawn from teamster slang, mountain-man jargon, fur-trade French, and military usage, many still in our language, most no longer understood.

Terms: 41
Coverage: A to Z

Applegate Trail

say/ˈæp.əl.ɡeɪt/

A southern alternative into Oregon opened in 1846 by Jesse, Lindsay, and Charles Applegate. It branched off the California Trail at the Humboldt River, crossed northern California, and entered the Willamette Valley from the south, letting wagons skip the dangerous Columbia rafting.

Articles of association

say/əˌsoʊ.siˈeɪ.ʃən/

Written rules a wagon-train company drew up before leaving Independence. They covered the captain's powers, the daily order of march, food sharing, and penalties for desertion or disobedience. Common from the 1850s onward.

Bartleson-Bidwell Party

say/ˌbɑːrt.əl.sən ˈbɪd.wɛl/

About 70 emigrants who left Missouri in 1841, the first organised wagon train aimed at the Pacific. Half pushed on for California, half for Oregon. Their crossing opened the trail's emigrant era.

Barlow Road

say/ˈbɑːr.loʊ roʊd/

An 1846 toll road around the south side of Mount Hood, built by Sam Barlow and Joel Palmer. At $5 per wagon it let emigrants finish the trail by land instead of rafting the Columbia. Sections of the original wagon trace are preserved today.

Bull-whacker

say/bʊl ˌwæk.ər/

A teamster who drove oxen rather than horses or mules. The job required walking beside the team, often for the entire day, with a long whip used more for noise than for hitting.

Buffalo chip

say/tʃɪp/

Dried bison dung. The primary fuel on the treeless plains: once dry it burned hot and almost smokeless. Children's work was to gather it; adults often called it 'prairie coal'.

Caulking

say/ˈkɔː.kɪŋ/

Sealing the seams of a wagon box with tar or pitch so the wagon could float across rivers like a crude boat. Often the only way to cross the deep, muddy Platte before ferries arrived.

Cholera

say/ˈkɒl.ər.ə/

A bacterial infection of the small intestine, spread through water contaminated with human waste. The single deadliest threat on the trail in the peak years of 1849 to 1855, when an emigrant could go from healthy to dead in a day.

Continental Divide

say/ˌkɒn.tɪˈnɛn.təl dɪˈvaɪd/

The watershed line separating rivers that flow to the Pacific from those that flow to the Atlantic or Gulf. The Oregon Trail crossed it at South Pass, Wyoming.

Donation Land Claim Act

say/doʊˈneɪ.ʃən/

An 1850 U.S. law granting a single white settler 320 acres of Oregon land, and a married couple 640 acres, in exchange for four years' residence and cultivation. A powerful magnet for emigration through 1855.

Donner Party

say/ˈdɒn.ər/

A California-bound emigrant company that took the unproven Hastings Cutoff in 1846 and became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada through the winter of 1846 and 1847. Of 87 members, 39 died, and many of the 48 survivors resorted to cannibalism. The most-cited cautionary tale in trail history.

Emigrant

say/ˈɛm.ɪ.ɡrənt/

A person leaving one country or region to settle in another. Trail travellers consistently called themselves 'emigrants', not 'immigrants', because they were leaving home, not arriving.

Forty-niner

say/ˈfɔːr.ti naɪn.ər/

A migrant who joined the 1849 California Gold Rush. Many took the Oregon Trail as far as the Parting of the Ways in present-day Wyoming, then turned south on the California Trail.

Fort

say/fɔːrt/

On the trail, usually a fur-trading post rather than a military installation. Forts Laramie, Bridger, Hall, and Boise all began as private trading posts; only Forts Kearny (1848) and Laramie (after 1849) were Army forts during the trail era.

Great Migration

say/ˌɡreɪt maɪˈɡreɪ.ʃən/

The 1843 wagon train of about 1,000 settlers, led by John Gantt and joined by Marcus Whitman. It was the first emigration big enough to prove wagons could finish the entire trip, and Jesse Applegate's memoir of it is the trail's classic first-person literature.

Greenhorn

say/ˈɡriːn.hɔːrn/

A novice. Veteran trail hands used the term for first-time emigrants who had to be taught how to yoke oxen, ford rivers, and ration food.

Hastings Cutoff

say/ˈheɪ.stɪŋz/

A poorly-scouted shortcut promoted by Lansford Hastings in his 1845 emigrant guide. Crossing the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake Desert, it cost the Donner Party the weeks that left them snowbound in the Sierra. Most later trains avoided it.

Hudson's Bay Company

say/ˈhʌd.sənz beɪ/

The British fur-trading firm that effectively governed the Pacific Northwest before 1846. Its forts at Vancouver, Walla Walla, Hall, and Boise sold supplies to American emigrants despite London's instructions to discourage settlement.

Independence Rock

say/ˌɪn.dəˈpɛn.dəns rɒk/

A 130-foot granite dome on the Sweetwater River in present-day Wyoming. Reaching it by July 4th meant a train was on schedule to clear the mountains before the snows. Father De Smet called it 'the great register of the desert', and more than 5,000 names are carved or painted on its sides.

Jumping-off point

say/ˈdʒʌm.pɪŋ ɒf/

A Missouri River town where emigrants outfitted and joined a wagon train. Independence, Westport, St. Joseph, and (later) Council Bluffs were the four main ones. Each was a busy spring market town from March through May.

Lay-by day

say/ˈleɪ.baɪ/

A scheduled rest day on the trail, most often a Sunday. Wagons stopped, oxen grazed, women caught up on washing and baking, and men repaired wagons. Trains that skipped lay-by days exhausted their livestock and often paid for it later.

Manifest Destiny

say/ˈmæn.ɪ.fɛst ˈdɛs.tɪ.ni/

The 19th-century belief that the United States was fated to expand across the North American continent. Coined by editor John O'Sullivan in 1845; used both to motivate emigration and to justify the wars that followed.

Mountain man

say/ˈmaʊn.tən mæn/

A trapper-trader who lived seasonally in the Rocky Mountains during the fur-trade era of roughly 1810 to 1840. Their geographic knowledge and trail-blazing made the Oregon Trail possible. Famous examples: Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith, Joe Walker, Kit Carson.

Outfit

say/ˈaʊt.fɪt/

The complete set of wagon, animals, food, tools, and personal goods needed for the journey. To 'outfit' was to assemble all of it, usually two to four weeks' work in a Missouri River town.

Parting of the Ways

say/ˈpɑːr.tɪŋ/

Junctions where the trail split. The most famous, in present-day Wyoming about ten miles west of South Pass, is where wagons chose between the longer route south to Fort Bridger and the shorter Sublette Cutoff straight across the desert. Oregon-bound and California-bound trains parted further west, near Soda Springs and the Raft River.

Pony Express

say/ˈpoʊ.ni ɪkˈsprɛs/

A relay-rider mail service that ran from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, between April 1860 and October 1861. Mail crossed in about ten days. The first transcontinental telegraph put the service out of business inside eighteen months.

Prairie schooner

say/ˈprɛəri ˈskuː.nər/

The standard emigrant wagon. Smaller than a Conestoga, with a flat bed and a canvas cover stretched over hickory bows that resembled a ship's sails. Pulled by three or four yoke of oxen.

Provisions

say/prəˈvɪʒ.ənz/

The food a family carried for the journey. Per adult: roughly 200 lb of flour, 75 lb of bacon, 25 lb of coffee or sugar, plus beans, rice, salt, and dried fruit. Underprovisioning was a common cause of trail-end starvation.

say/ˈrɛdʒ.ɪs.tər klɪf/

A soft sandstone bluff on the North Platte in Wyoming where thousands of emigrants carved their names. Many inscriptions from the 1840s and 1850s are still legible, the trail's most personal archive.

Rendezvous

say/ˈrɒn.deɪ.vuː/

An annual gathering of fur trappers, traders, and Native partners, held each year from 1825 to 1840 in the Rocky Mountains. The rendezvous system pioneered the routes the trail later followed.

Saleratus

say/ˌsæl.əˈreɪ.təs/

An old name for sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), used to leaven biscuits and pancakes. Trail emigrants gathered it in chunks at alkali flats in present-day Wyoming and Idaho.

Scurvy

say/ˈskɜːr.vi/

Vitamin C deficiency, common after months of preserved meat and flour with no fresh produce. Caused gums to bleed, old wounds to reopen, and eventually proved fatal. Dried fruit was the cheapest preventive.

Snake River Plain

say/sneɪk/

A wide volcanic plain across southern Idaho that the trail crossed for nearly 400 miles. Hot, dusty, and short on grass, and home to the canyons that wagons had to skirt all the way to Fort Boise.

South Pass

say/saʊθ pæs/

The 7,412-foot saddle in present-day Wyoming that allowed wagons to cross the Rocky Mountains. So broad and gentle that many emigrants crossed without realising it, and asked guides to point out the Continental Divide afterward.

Stampede

say/stæmˈpiːd/

Panicked flight of livestock, often triggered at night by storms, predators, or unfamiliar smells. A bad stampede could destroy a wagon train's draft animals and end the journey.

Sublette Cutoff

say/səˈblɛt/

A shortcut opened in 1844 by Caleb Greenwood (sometimes called the Greenwood Cutoff) and named for trader William Sublette. It saved about 70 miles by leaving the main trail ten miles west of South Pass and crossing roughly 45 miles of waterless desert directly to the Green River, instead of going south to Fort Bridger.

Sutler

say/ˈsʌt.lər/

A merchant attached to a fort or military post selling goods to soldiers and civilians. Forts Laramie and Kearny each had a sutler's store where emigrants restocked sugar, coffee, ammunition, and small luxuries.

Treaty of Fort Laramie

say/fɔːrt ləˈræm.i/

An 1851 agreement between the U.S. and eight Plains nations (Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara) on territorial boundaries and safe passage in exchange for annuities. The agreement collapsed within a decade.

Wagon train

say/ˈwæɡ.ən treɪn/

An organised company of emigrant wagons travelling together for safety and shared work. Most counted 20 to 60 wagons and 75 to 300 people, with an elected captain and a rotating order of march.

Westport

say/ˈwɛst.pɔːrt/

A Missouri River jumping-off town within today's Kansas City. Founded in 1833, it gradually overtook Independence in trail-bound volume through the late 1840s as steamboats found its landing easier, and it remained one of the four main launches alongside Independence, St. Joseph, and (later) Council Bluffs.

Yoke

say/joʊk/

The wooden crosspiece coupling a pair of oxen. Most prairie schooners were pulled by three or four yokes (six to eight oxen). To 'yoke up' was to harness the team for the day.