Nobody kept count of the dead on the Oregon Trail, and many were buried in unmarked graves, so every number is an estimate. Historians put the toll at about 3 to 10 percent of all travelers. Old movies filled the trail with arrows and stampedes, but the travelers’ own diaries tell a quieter story. Most deaths came from disease, and many others from accidents.
Fights with Native people killed far fewer emigrants than disease did. Cholera, spread by dirty water at crowded campsites, was the great killer, especially from 1849 to 1855. Drowning, wagon accidents and accidental shootings together took hundreds of lives.
01Disease
Disease killed far more travelers than anything else. Nobody knows exactly how many travelers died, because most graves were never marked. Historians' estimates run from about 3 to 10 percent, somewhere between 1 in 30 and 1 in 10, and most of them died of illness.
Cholera was the worst. It spread through water fouled by human waste and could kill a healthy adult in a day. In the epidemic years of 1849 to 1855 it killed thousands of travelers on the trails. Dysentery, typhoid, measles, diphtheria and 'mountain fever' took many more.
02Drowning
River crossings were among the worst dangers. The Platte, Laramie, Green, Snake and Columbia all took lives, and many emigrants could not swim. Wagon boxes were caulked and floated like boats, and cattle were driven to swim across. Ferries, such as the one Latter-day Saints ran on the North Platte from 1847, made crossings safer, but drownings never stopped.
03Accidental gunshot
Many emigrants carried guns they had little practice with, and accidents happened as guns were pulled from wagons or handled carelessly in camp. The only death in the 1841 Bartleson-Bidwell Party was a man who died of an accidental gunshot wound. Such accidents were most common in the first weeks of the trip, before people had learned to handle their guns carefully.
04Wagon accidents
Being run over was one of the most common ways to die on the trail. Children slipped while climbing on or off a moving wagon, and a skirt could catch in a wheel and pull someone under. In 1844 young Catherine Sager's dress caught as she jumped from her family's wagon, and a wheel ran over her leg and broke it. Steep grades added danger: on Laurel Hill, on the Barlow Road, wagons had to be let down by ropes.
05Starvation & exposure
A late start, lost time or a bad shortcut could leave a company short of food with snow in the mountains. In 1846 the Donner Party lost weeks on Lansford Hastings's new route and was trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada. Only 48 of its 87 members survived, and some of the starving survivors ate the bodies of the dead. The Meek Cutoff of 1845 and the first season on the Applegate Trail in 1846 also cost lives.
06Conflict with Native nations
Old Western stories made attacks the great danger of the trail, but deaths from fighting were few next to deaths from disease. Historian John Unruh counted 362 emigrants killed by Native people on the trails from 1840 to 1860, and 426 Native people killed by emigrants. Most meetings were peaceful trade and help at river crossings. Fighting grew in the 1860s, when troops left for the Civil War and miners and ranchers spread across Native land.