Gear & supplies

01Outfitting

To “outfit” meant to gather everything a family needed for the trip: wagon, animals, food, tools and clothing. Most emigrants did this in the towns along the Missouri River where the trail began: Independence and Westport (now part of Kansas City), St. Joseph, and later Kanesville (today’s Council Bluffs, Iowa) and Omaha.

What it cost depended on what a family already owned. Many emigrants were farmers who brought their own wagon and animals. Joseph Ware’s 1849 guide figured that four people buying a wagon, six mules and food would spend about $168 each, or about $55 each after taking off what the wagon and mules were still worth at the end. Forts along the way sold supplies, but at steep “mountain prices,” as Marcus Whitman described them in a letter of 1843.

Guidebooks helped people plan. Well-known guides included Lansford Hastings’s The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California (1845), Overton Johnson’s Route Across the Rocky Mountains (1846) and Joel Palmer’s Journal of Travels over the Rocky Mountains (1847).

The army officer Randolph B. Marcy’s The Prairie Traveler (1859) came later. Not every guide could be trusted. Hastings praised a shortcut to California before he had traveled it himself. In 1846 the Donner Party took his route, lost weeks, and was trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada. Of its 87 members, 48 survived.

02Food for the trip

Most of a wagon’s load was food. Joel Palmer’s 1847 guide told each adult to bring 200 pounds of flour, 30 pounds of pilot bread (hard crackers), 75 pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of rice, 5 pounds of coffee, 2 pounds of tea, 25 pounds of sugar, half a bushel of dried beans, a bushel of dried fruit, 2 pounds of saleratus (an early baking soda), 10 pounds of salt and half a bushel of corn meal, plus a small keg of vinegar. For four adults, the flour alone came to 800 pounds.

Randolph Marcy, writing twelve years later for a trip to California of about 110 days, suggested less: 150 pounds of flour and 25 pounds of bacon a person, with cattle driven along for fresh beef, plus 15 pounds of coffee and 25 of sugar. Bacon was the main meat.

Marcy advised packing it in strong sacks, or in very hot weather in boxes surrounded with bran, which kept the fat from melting away. Dried apples and peaches were popular, and wild berries and greens picked along the way helped keep scurvy away, though some travelers still got it.

Hunting added fresh meat. In the early years travelers often met bison along the Platte River, and many killed some for meat and jerky. Palmer noted that buffalo seldom ranged beyond South Pass. Farther west, travelers hunted elk, deer, antelope and sage hens and caught fish.

03The packing list

04What got thrown out

Heavy loads wore out the oxen, and before the mountains many families had to lighten their wagons. They left furniture and other heavy goods beside the trail. In 1849 so much was dumped near Fort Laramie that gold-rush travelers called the place “Camp Sacrifice.” Many had hauled extras along the easy stretch to Fort Laramie, then found they could not take them over the mountains.

Much of it was put to use. Later travelers picked through the piles and swapped their worn-out gear for better things. In the early years Mormon settlers hauled tons of iron from abandoned wagons back to the Salt Lake Valley. Others burned abandoned furniture and wagons as firewood.