Oregon Trail · 101

A first look at the whole story: where the trail ran, who traveled it and why, what a day on the road was like, and what the trail meant for the Native nations whose lands it crossed. About a 12-minute read.

01Summary

The Oregon Trail was a wagon road about 2,170 miles long. It ran from towns on the Missouri River, such as Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley in what is now western Oregon. Between 1841 and 1869, about 400,000 people went west on the Oregon Trail and on the California and Mormon trails, which shared much of its route. About 80,000 of them settled in Oregon. Most of the others turned off for California or Utah.

The trail was never one single track. From the Missouri River it followed the Platte River across the Great Plains, crossed the Rocky Mountains at South Pass, and followed the Snake River across present-day Idaho. Then it climbed over the Blue Mountains and reached the Columbia River. Until 1846 most emigrants finished the trip by floating down the Columbia on rafts. After that, many took the Barlow Road around Mount Hood to Oregon City.

Our long journey thus began in sunshine and song, in anecdote and laughter; but these all vanished before we reached its termination.
Peter H. BurnettA leader of the 1843 wagon train, Recollections and Opinions of an Old Pioneer, 1880

02Where the name comes from

Nobody knows for certain where the name Oregon comes from. Its oldest known use is from 1765, when a colonial soldier named Major Robert Rogers asked King George III to pay for an expedition to find the Northwest Passage, a hoped-for water route to the Pacific. He planned to go by way of “the River called by the Indians Ouragon.”

In 1778 the explorer Jonathan Carver put the name in a widely read book about his travels. To him the Oregon was the “River of the West,” which he said flowed into the Pacific Ocean.

Many scholars now think the word most likely came from an Algonquian language, one of a family of Native languages spoken east of the Rocky Mountains. One strong idea links it to wauregan, a word meaning “the beautiful” that Native people in New England used for the Ohio River. You may also read that the name comes from oregano, the herb. Historians have found no evidence for that story.

03Before the wagons

The Oregon Trail grew out of much older paths. Native peoples had used its river valleys, river crossings and mountain passes long before any wagon rolled west. South Pass, the wide, gentle gap that lets travelers cross the Rocky Mountains in present-day Wyoming, had been used by American Indians for thousands of years.

Fur traders were the first outsiders to follow much of the route. In 1811 John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company built Fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River. In 1812 Robert Stuart, one of the company’s partners, crossed South Pass with six companions on his way east from Astoria.

In the 1820s and 1830s trappers met every summer at trading fairs in the Rocky Mountains called rendezvous, and their supply caravans came up the Platte River. In 1830 the trader William Sublette brought ten wagons as far as the Wind River, and in 1832 Captain Benjamin Bonneville took twenty wagons over South Pass.

Missionaries came next. In 1836 Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and Henry and Eliza Spalding traveled west to start missions among the Cayuse and Nez Perce. Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding were the first European-American women to cross the Rocky Mountains.

The party brought a wagon. After an axle broke, the men cut it down into a two-wheeled cart, and they left it at Fort Boise. In 1840 the mountain men Robert Newell and Joseph Meek drove wagons from Fort Hall to Fort Walla Walla, near the Columbia River, and in 1841 Newell brought the first wagons into the Willamette Valley.

04The emigration years

In 1841 the first small party of emigrants set out from Missouri with wagons, bound for the Pacific. Known today as the Bartleson-Bidwell Party, it traveled with a group of Catholic missionaries guided by the mountain man Thomas Fitzpatrick. At Soda Springs, in present-day Idaho, the emigrants split up. About half went on to California, and the rest turned toward Oregon.

Why go so far? Most emigrants were farm families, many from the Mississippi Valley, where hard times and outbreaks of disease had made life difficult. Letters and books praised Oregon’s mild climate and rich soil, and in 1843 the settlers’ own government in Oregon promised 640 acres of land to a family. People called setting out on the journey going “to see the elephant,” a saying of the time that meant facing great hardship to see something amazing.

Two years after the first party came the Great Migration of 1843. About 700 to 1,000 people (the accounts differ) left the Independence area in May with more than 100 wagons and thousands of cattle. They got their wagons all the way to the Columbia River at The Dalles, which showed that families could make the trip.

After that, more than a thousand emigrants came to Oregon in most years. In 1846 the United States and Britain signed the Oregon Treaty, which made the land south of the 49th parallel part of the United States. That land later became Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming.

When gold was found in California in 1848, most westbound travelers headed there instead. Oregon still drew settlers, especially after the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 offered free land: 320 acres to a single man and 640 to a married couple already living there by December 1, 1850.

The law was written for white settlers and shut out Black and Hawaiian settlers. Congress passed it before the Native nations who lived on that land had given it up in any treaty. The busiest year on the western trails was 1852. The historian John D. Unruh Jr. estimated that about 70,000 people set out that year, and about 10,000 of them were headed for Oregon.

05The route

Most emigrants set out in April or May, once the prairie grass had grown enough to feed their oxen. From the Missouri River towns the trail crossed the Kansas River and headed northwest to the Platte River in present-day Nebraska, near where the army built Fort Kearny in 1848.

For hundreds of miles the wagons then followed the Platte and North Platte rivers west, past Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff, to Fort Laramie in present-day Wyoming. It began as a fur-trading post, and from 1849 it was an army fort where travelers could rest and buy supplies.

Emigrants tried to keep to a schedule. One common plan was to reach Fort Kearny by the middle of May and Fort Laramie by the middle of June, and many hoped to reach Independence Rock by the Fourth of July. The goal was to be in Oregon by mid-September, before snow closed the mountains. West of Fort Laramie the trail followed the North Platte and then the Sweetwater River, past Independence Rock, to South Pass, about 7,412 feet above sea level.

Beyond South Pass the trails began to split. Mormon emigrants turned southwest at Fort Bridger toward the Salt Lake Valley. Many travelers bound for California stayed on the Oregon Trail past Fort Hall and turned southwest at the Raft River. Oregon-bound families followed the Snake River across present-day Idaho.

For many, the last part of the trip was the hardest. The trail climbed over the Blue Mountains and followed the Columbia River to The Dalles. Until 1846 families there had to take their wagons apart and float them down the dangerous Columbia on rafts. From 1846 many paid a toll of $5 per wagon to use the Barlow Road around the south side of Mount Hood to Oregon City, the end of the trail.

06Wagons & oxen

Most families used ordinary farm wagons. The wooden wagon box was 10 to 12 feet long and 4 feet wide, and the wheels had iron rims. Wooden bows arched over the box to hold a cover of canvas or other cloth. People called these covered wagons prairie schooners, because their white covers looked like the sails of a ship crossing a sea of grass. They were smaller and lighter than the big Conestoga freight wagons of the East, which were too heavy for the long trip west.

Joel Palmer’s 1847 guidebook said a family with one good team could start from Missouri with 2,500 pounds of food, clothes, cooking gear and tools. Most emigrants hitched oxen to their wagons rather than horses or mules. Oxen cost less, had more endurance, could live on prairie grass, and were less likely to be stolen. On a travel day a wagon usually covered 12 to 15 miles.

Oxen walked about two miles an hour, and they wore no reins. The driver walked beside the team and steered it with a whip and spoken commands: “gee” to turn right, “haw” to turn left and “whoa” to stop.

For those who fit out but one wagon, it is not safe to start with less than four yoke of oxen, as they are liable to get lame, have sore necks, or to stray away.
Joel PalmerJournal of Travels over the Rocky Mountains, 1847

07Daily life

Most emigrants walked beside their wagons all day. Riding was rough and dusty and added weight for the oxen to pull. Years later, Jesse Applegate described a day in 1843 with the “cow column,” the slower part of that year’s wagon train, which he led. Guards fired their rifles at 4 a.m. to wake the camp.

By 7 a.m. the herders had rounded up the cattle, breakfast was eaten, the tents were down, the oxen were yoked, and the wagons rolled out. At noon the company stopped for about an hour so the animals could rest and graze. As the sun got low, the wagons pulled into a circle for the night.

On the treeless plains there was little firewood, so people cooked over fires of dried buffalo dung, called buffalo chips. Gathering them was often a job for children. Women did most of the cooking and washing and cared for the little ones. Men and boys herded the loose horses and cattle and stood guard at night. In the evening, Applegate remembered, a violin played while young people danced.

It is four o'clock A. M.; the sentinels on duty have discharged their rifles—the signal that the hours of sleep are over—and every wagon and tent is pouring forth its night tenants...
Jesse ApplegateA Day with the Cow Column in 1843, first published in 1868
Sundays

Some companies rested on Sundays, to worship, wash clothes, mend wagons and let the oxen graze. Others kept moving because they worried about reaching the mountains before the snow.

Read the diaries

Only a small share of travelers kept a diary, but many of those diaries were later printed. Narcissa Whitman’s journal of 1836 and Lodisa Frizzell’s diary of 1852 are two good ones to start with, written by two women sixteen years apart.

08Dangers on the trail

Nobody knows exactly how many emigrants died on the way. Historians’ estimates run from about 3 to 10 percent, somewhere between 1 in 30 and 1 in 10. Many were buried in unmarked graves beside the road.

Disease killed far more people than anything else, and cholera was the worst. It spread through water fouled by crowded camps and could kill a healthy person within a day. It struck hardest in the busiest years, from 1849 to 1855, when thousands of travelers used the same campsites. Most deaths from disease happened east of Fort Laramie.

Accidents took many lives too. People drowned at river crossings, were run over by wagons, or were killed when guns went off by mistake. Late travelers also risked being caught by snow in the mountains.

09Native nations & the trail

The trail ran through the homelands of many Native nations, among them the Pawnee, Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone, Bannock, Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla, Nez Perce and Kalapuya. Old Western movies made attacks on wagon trains look common, but most meetings between emigrants and Native people were peaceful.

Native people sold food to travelers and helped them across rivers, often for payment. In October 1843 Peter Burnett’s company bought corn, peas and potatoes from a village below the Blue Mountains, and he wrote: “I have never tasted a greater luxury than the potatoes we ate on this occasion.”

There was violence on both sides, and it grew as more and more emigrants crossed Native lands. Emigrants killed Native people as well as the other way around, and reports of attacks were often exaggerated.

For the Native nations, the trail brought lasting harm. Emigrants’ cattle ate the grass along the route, travelers hunted the game, and diseases such as measles spread into Native communities. In 1847 measles killed as many as half of the Cayuse people. Beginning on November 29, a small group of Cayuse men killed Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and eleven others at and near their mission, blaming the doctor for the deaths.

The United States then made treaties to secure the road and to take land. In the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, Plains nations agreed to let emigrants pass safely and to allow roads and forts on their lands in return for yearly payments of goods. The U.S. Senate later cut those payments from fifty years to ten.

In 1855, at a treaty council in the Walla Walla Valley, the Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla, Nez Perce, Yakama and Palouse were pressed to give up most of their lands. None of them had asked for the council. The Cayuse leader Stikus asked the U.S. officials to think of the land as a mother, and asked how they would feel if someone sold their own mother.

10The end of the wagon era

On May 10, 1869, the first transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory. Travelers could now ride from the Missouri River to California in about a week instead of months, and the great wagon migrations faded away. Some families still went west by wagon for years afterward.

The trail’s effects lasted much longer. The settlers who came over it helped make Oregon a U.S. territory in 1848 and a state in 1859. For the Native nations of the Northwest, the same years brought war, lost land and life on reservations. Today the route is the Oregon National Historic Trail, created by Congress in 1978, and wagon ruts can still be seen in places such as Guernsey, Wyoming.

11The computer game

Many people first meet the trail through a computer game. In 1971 three Carleton College students working as student teachers in Minneapolis, Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, wrote a text game called The Oregon Trail for Rawitsch’s eighth-grade history class. In 1975 Rawitsch, by then working for the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), put a new version on MECC’s computer network, where students across Minnesota could play it.

In 1985 MECC released a new version with pictures for the Apple II. It added river crossings, landmarks and diseases such as dysentery, and it made the words “You have died of dysentery” famous. The version you can play on this site is The Oregon Trail Deluxe, MECC’s 1992 release for MS-DOS computers.

12Sources

The facts on this page were checked against these sources.