01A wagon-train company
Wagon companies were made up of families, relatives, neighbors and single men who agreed to travel together for safety and help along the way. The great company of 1843 counted an estimated 700 to 1,000 people. When its orderly sergeant, James Nesmith, took down the names of the men available for duty, there were 254 of them, with 111 wagons.
Companies made their own rules. On May 18, 1843, the Oregon emigrants met at a grove west of Fitzhugh’s Mill in Missouri and chose committees to write rules and to inspect everyone’s outfit. On June 1, near the Kansas River, they elected Peter H. Burnett captain, along with nine councilmen.
Burnett, who later became the first governor of the state of California, found the huge company hard to lead and resigned after eight days. The company soon split into smaller groups. Jesse Applegate became captain of the slower “cow column,” which drove the loose cattle. In his column the sixty wagons traveled in fifteen groups of four, and the group at the front one day moved to the back the next.
It was moved and seconded that there be a committee of nine appointed to draft rules and regulations to govern the company. Resolved, that a committee of seven be appointed for the purpose of inspecting the outfits of the different individuals comprising the company.
01The emigrant familySettlers
Oregon-bound trains were made up mostly of families, often traveling with relatives and neighbors from home. Parents, children and sometimes grandparents walked beside a wagon that held the food, tools and bedding a new farm would need.
Whole families made the trip together. Ezra and Eliza Jane Meeker set out in 1852 with a son born only weeks before. Henry and Naomi Sager left Missouri in 1844 with six children, and Naomi gave birth to a seventh soon after they set out. Both parents died on the way, and in October 1844 the seven Sager orphans were taken in at the Whitman Mission near Walla Walla.
Not every emigrant was white. Historians think Black travelers made up perhaps 3 percent of the people on the trail before 1860. Some were enslaved, and many were free. George Bush, a free Black man, crossed in 1844 with the Simmons party and lent money to other emigrants along the way. Oregon's provisional government had voted to bar Black settlers, so the Simmons party went north to Puget Sound instead.
02The wagon captainElected leader
Each company elected a captain, usually with a council to help him. The captain kept order on the march and in camp and settled quarrels, but he led only as long as the company agreed to follow.
Peter H. Burnett, a lawyer who later became the first elected governor of California, was chosen captain of the great 1843 company on June 1, near the Kansas River. He resigned on June 8. 'It became very doubtful,' he wrote years later, 'whether so large a body of emigrants could be practically kept together on such a journey.' William Martin took his place, and the company soon split into smaller trains, with Jesse Applegate leading the slower 'cow column' that drove the loose cattle.
Most companies put their rules in writing. Until about 1850 many adopted a constitution that named their officers and set out duties for guard and march, and some set up their own courts. The usual punishments were extra guard duty or being put out of the company. Whippings were rare.
03The trail guidePilot
Former mountain men hired out as pilots to lead trains over country they knew. In 1843 John Gantt, a former Army officer, was hired to guide the great emigration as far as Fort Hall. A good pilot found grass, water and safe fords. A bad one could lead a train into disaster.
Caleb Greenwood, a trapper who said he was about eighty years old, guided the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy party in 1844. They became the first emigrants to take wagons over the Sierra Nevada into California, and on the way they opened a shortcut across the dry country west of South Pass, later called the Sublette Cutoff. Joseph R. Walker, who had crossed the Sierra with a fur brigade in 1833, led wagons of the Chiles party toward California in 1843, though they had to leave the wagons behind before the last mountain crossing.
A wrong turn could be deadly. In 1845 Stephen Meek led about 200 wagons, carrying more than 1,000 people, off the main trail and into the high desert of central Oregon, on a shortcut he promised would save 150 miles. He did not know the country, he seemed to lose his way, and the company sometimes went days without water.
At least 23 people died on the cutoff, and more died soon after the survivors reached The Dalles. The next year the Donner Party took Lansford Hastings's new route south of the Great Salt Lake. Only 48 of its 87 members lived to reach California.
04The blacksmithRepair
Wagons broke down all the way west. Every company counted on a few men who could shoe horses and mules, reset loose iron tires and mend chains and bolts. Hastings wrote that there were 'always, several mechanics of that kind, belonging to each company.'
Heat and dry air shrank the wooden wheels until the iron tires worked loose. Lansford Hastings advised having the tires reset before leaving Independence, and emigrants soaked their wheels in streams overnight to swell the wood. Spare parts rode in a jockey box on the wagon: bolts, linchpins, nails, hoop iron, tools and a jack.
The trading posts offered some help. In December 1843 Jim Bridger, who had been apprenticed to a blacksmith as a boy, sent word to St. Louis that he had built a small fort on Blacks Fork of the Green River, right on the emigrant road, with a blacksmith shop and a supply of iron. But such posts were few and far apart, and most companies relied on their own smiths.
05The doctorMedicine
Some trains traveled with a doctor, and most families packed their own medicines: calomel, laudanum and quinine, with a home-medicine book to explain the doses. None of it could stop cholera, the worst killer on the trail.
Home-medicine books such as William Buchan's Domestic Medicine (first published in 1769) and John C. Gunn's Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man's Friend (1830) told families how to treat illness far from a doctor. Common remedies included calomel (a mercury compound), laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol) and quinine for fevers. Joel Palmer advised families to carry medicines, though he claimed in 1847 that 'it is seldom however, that emigrants are sick.'
Some trains did travel with doctors. In 1843 Dr. Marcus Whitman rode with the great emigration, and Jesse Applegate described him helping a mother through childbirth beside the trail. In 1844 a German doctor in the Sager family's train helped care for young Catherine Sager's badly broken leg. But no doctor of the time could cure cholera. In the epidemic years of 1849 to 1855 it killed thousands of travelers.
06The cookProvisions
In family trains most of the cooking fell to women and older girls. Meals were cooked over an open fire, often of buffalo chips where there was no wood, in a Dutch oven, a skillet and a coffee pot, and the flour and bacon had to last for months.
Guidebook writers kept the kitchen small. Lansford Hastings listed 'a baking-kettle, frying-pan, tea-kettle, tea-pot, and coffee-pot' along with tin plates, cups, knives, forks, spoons and a coffee mill. Joel Palmer called 'a dutch oven and skillet of cast metal' very essential, and suggested a sheet-iron stove carried at the back of the wagon, because wood was often scarce.
On the plains the fuel was often dried bison dung, which trappers called buffalo chips and French-speaking traders called bois de vache. It 'burns well when perfectly dry,' Randolph Marcy wrote, but it would not burn wet, so travelers gathered it before a storm and carried it in the wagons. Families with a cow had milk the whole way, and a churn hung on a jolting wagon could turn morning milk into a little butter by evening.
07The hunterGame
Men rode out after bison, antelope, deer and sage hens when they had the chance, but no family could count on game. Hastings warned that a large party depending on buffalo for its meat would, 'in nine cases out of ten,' end up starving.
In the 1840s trains could still meet large bison herds along the Platte. Joel Palmer noted that the buffalo 'seldom range beyond the South Pass, and never west of Green river.' Hunters in Ezra Meeker's train shot bison for meat in 1852, and one night a stampeding herd thundered past their camp. Some of their neighbors never found their scattered teams.
The herds near the road did not last. In 1851 the treaty commissioner David Mitchell, riding west to the great council near Fort Laramie, saw just one buffalo between Fort Kearny and Fort Laramie. Guns brought their own danger. Careless handling caused many accidental shootings, especially in the first weeks of the trip.
08The scoutPathfinder
Scouts rode ahead each day to find the next camp and the best place to cross a stream. Randolph Marcy's rule for a camp was simple: grass came first, then water, then fuel.
When the Army's John C. Frémont mapped the road over South Pass in 1842, Kit Carson was his guide. Frémont's reports, written with his wife Jessie Benton Frémont, and a set of trail maps printed in 1846 were used by many emigrants, and Joseph Ware's popular 1849 guidebook drew heavily on them.
Much of the best local knowledge came from Native people. In 1845 Sam Barlow and Joel Palmer learned from Native people of a trail across the southern slope of Mount Hood, and the Barlow Road followed it. In 1843 Marcus Whitman led the great emigration from Fort Hall to the Grande Ronde valley and then left it with an Indian guide named Stikas, who, Peter Burnett wrote, 'proved to be both faithful and competent.' Native people also helped wagons across rivers, usually for payment.
02Notable figures
A few names come up again and again in the story of the trail: missionaries who went west before the wagon trains, mountain men who knew the country, the builders of forts and toll roads, and leaders such as the Shoshone chief Washakie. Each has a page of their own about their life, why they matter, how they died and what they left behind.