Above all, they were restless-once a farm had been tamed, the narrow horizons of the backwoods communities closed around them.
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The women were used to walking beside the men as wilderness equals. They were adept with wagons, livestock, rifles and axes. But they were farm folk and had pioneered before. Ignorance allowed travelers to advance where fuller knowledge might have rooted them with apprehension. It was said that snow did not exist in California’s golden valleys, that the black soil of Oregon was bottomless, that vast rivers afforded easy transportation, and that no forests barred the way to migrating wagons. The doldrums that followed the depression of 1837 shriveled the value of land and the price of crops, and malaria ravaged the bottomlands that once had promised so much. They did know that the backcountry of Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas had not proved to be a shining paradise.
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For the most part they were farmers-family men, with wives and children-who had a common goal of seeking a promised land of milk and honey in far-off Oregon, about which they knew as little as they did about how to get there. They came from all directions, by steamboat and over primitive roads that a day or two of heavy rain turned into quagmires. In 1843, the trickle of emigrants into Independence, Missouri, began to swell. The trail pointed the way for the United States to expand westward to achieve what politicians of the day called its “Manifest Destiny” to reach “from sea to shining sea.”
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Everything from California to Alaska and between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean was a British-held territory called Oregon. The Oregon Trail opened at a time when the westward settlement and development of the trans-Mississippi West had stalled at the Missouri River Mexico still claimed all of California, and Alaska remained Russian territory. This road to the Far West soon became known by another name-the Oregon Trail.Įven today, ruts from the wagon wheels remain etched indelibly in the fragile topsoil of the Western landscape. It ran beside waterways, stretched across tall-grass and short-grass prairies, wound through mountain passes, and then spanned the Pacific Slope to the promised lands of Oregon and California. In the spring of 1843, the first ripple of a coming tide of would-be settlers piled everything they owned into canvas-covered wagons, handcarts and any other vehicle that could move, and set out along a dim trace called the “Emigrant Road.” They went by way of a route that was a broad ribbon of threads, sometimes intertwining, sometimes splitting off into frayed digressions. To view maps and images of the Oregon Trail, see our Oregon Trail Map pageĪrticles Featuring The Oregon Trail From HistoryNet Magazines When the first railroad was completed, allowing faster and more convenient travel, use of the trail quickly declined. The many offshoots of the trail and the main trail itself were used by an estimated 350,000 settlers from the 1830s through 1869. These met along the lower part of Plate River Valley which was located near Fort Kearny. There were several starting points in Nebraska Territory, Iowa and Missouri. Improvements on the trail in the form of better roads, ferries, bridges and “cutouts” made the trip both safer and faster each year. Work was done to clear more and more of the trail stretching farther West and it eventually reached Willamette Valley, Oregon. It started in Independence, Missouri and traveled a cleared trail that reached to Fort Hall, Idaho. By the year 1836, the first of the migrant train of wagons was put together. It could only be traveled by horseback or on foot.
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Fur Trappers Lay Down The Oregon Trailįrom about 1811-1840 the Oregon Trail was laid down by traders and fur trappers. Travelers were inspired by dreams of gold and rich farmlands, but they were also motivated by difficult economic times in the east and diseases like yellow fever and malaria that were decimating the Midwest around 1837. Oregon Trail summary: The 2,200-mile east-west trail served as a critical transportation route for emigrants traveling from Missouri to Oregon and other points west during the mid-1800s. Facts, information and articles about The Oregon Trail, a part of Westward Expansionfrom the Wild West