Between 1840 and 1860, 300,000 to 400,000 Americans moved west on covered wagons for 2,100 miles across the Oregon and California trails. In those two decades they transformed our nation and endured cholera, drowning, accidental and not-so accidental gunshot wounds, death by lightning and influenza, but only rarely death by Indian attack. Across the West on sections of National Conservation Land, wagon routes and ruts are preserved.
More settlers died from accidental gunshot wounds than ever died from Native Americans. In fact, of those emigrants moving west to firmly establish Euro-Americans claim to the Pacific coast, only ½ of 1 % died at the hands of tribes and then only in the last years of the great migration as water holes had become polluted, game run off and shot and thousands of livestock had devastated rich grasslands. Most deaths were west of the Continental Divide.
For years Native Americans along the Oregon Trail befriended settlers, helped them across and traded valuable food stuffs for clothing and trinkets. Such negotiations were often successfully handled by women, some emigrant wives not yet sixteen years old. Pioneers met friendly Shoshones and Paiutes who sometimes acted as guides and helped hunt. In the early days tribal members found low water river crossings before they became dominated by backtracking men of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who knew that at strategic river crossings they could enact tolls.
The way west had been described by the journals of John C. Fremont, though his wife Jesse Benton Fremont really wrote his reports in vivid prose that sparked the nation’s movement west. Maps by Charles Preuss helped to guide westbound emigrants who always sought water, wood and grass, though often they did not find those valuable trail commodities in the same place. It might be miles and days between water with bellowing, thirsty cattle and equally dry children walking besides the wagons with pebbles in their mouth to spur saliva or constantly chewing ends of grama grass. Up at 4 a.m., the pioneers cooked on fires of buffalo chips, hoping to find better fuel. For lunch while “nooning,” a 19th century term, they had bread and bacon. For dinner at twilight, it was bacon and bread.
Families came west for their fortunes after the devastating 1837 economic collapse, but also to avoid diseases in the humid east and Midwest. They had “Oregon Fever” to avoid real fevers from typhoid, malaria, cholera, yellow fever, measles and scarlet fever. Out on the high plains with the warm days and cool nights they experienced a completely different climate. Americans also moved because they felt it was their patriotic duty.
The peak years were 1849-1852 just after gold had been discovered in Sutter’s Mill in California. On braided routes, wagon trains moved west following the Platte River and then dry stretches of sagebrush and rocky hills and mountains in Oregon where teamsters roughlocked their wagons to reduce speed on steep descents. Children died under wagon wheels. Young women died in childbirth. Few physicians made the trip and estimates are of deaths, graves and crosses at intervals of 80 yards.
A hasty burial a few feet down, hats off, a hymn and then wagons rolled leaving another unmarked grave hopefully safe from coyotes and marauding human thieves. On the route across the continent deaths occurred but also marriages, births and families linked forever creating deep bonds that endured for decades. Single men moved fast with their rifles, pistols, picks and shovels headed for the Sierras and gold country, but on the Oregon Trail it was families walking across the Great Plains and then the mountain valleys believing in the future of America to overspread the continent from sea to shining sea.
The ordeal included six to eight months of grueling travel in a wagon with no springs, heat sometimes of 110 degrees, yet these were young families with 20% of the women pregnant and forced to share their husbands’ dreams. Most emigrants were between 16 and 35 years of age. Women were uprooted, lonely, desperate, deprived of privacy and the safety and security of their homes. But they reconstituted community as they moved west baking quick bread, fixing beans, sewing blankets and torn shirts and doctoring smashed fingers, toes and punctured skin. Few women initiated the idea of taking the Oregon Trail. It was almost always the men.
Historians have studied diaries written on the trail and many entries record the death of a father, husband, child or wife. Probably 10% of those who started died along the trail. But wherever there was a woman there was the nucleus of a home. Women moving west re-created the kinship circles they had known before they “jumped off” beyond the states. The young mothers literally gave birth to a new nation. During the years of historic crossings, the trail was hard to lose because of the number of stinking, bloated dead animal carcasses rotting in the sunshine and the sheer amount of household goods that had been thrown out or fallen out of wagons like a huge mercantile store scattered east to west.
The Oregon Trail was not a single trail, but rather a braided movement west sometimes five miles wide, though narrower if unforgiving terrain squeezed down the route. “The ‘trail’ was really just an aggregated landscape that the pioneers followed across the plains and then the high deserts … The Oregon Trail is what historic space always becomes – a landscape blending modernity with the past,” notes Rinker Buck in his highly readable The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey.
Most of the route traversed has become private farms, ranches, county roads and even interstate highways. But up out of the river valleys and on dry, rocky benches, in the bottoms of canyons, or in long stretches of desert, portions of the Oregon Trail still remain on Bureau of Land Management National Conservation Lands especially across Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon.
I found such a site south and east of Vale, Oregon, and I walked the path that they had walked – the women in long cotton dresses with tight bonnets on their heads, barefoot children swishing sticks in the long grasses to watch grasshoppers jump, bearded husbands in straw hats calling their oxen by name, and scouts on horseback on both sides of the long reach of dusty wagons making one more uphill pull and hoping for clean water soon.
On a hot June day, standing in shade and listening to the wind and the song of a meadowlark at Keeney Pass on National Conservation Lands, I thought of the noise from 175 years ago – the squeak of dry wagon wheels, the rattle of trace chains, wagon loads shifting side to side going uphill, the delightful yells and songs of children, the worried calls of pioneer mothers, and mules’ tails constantly swishing flies. I smelled sweat from teams soaking into their already blackened harnesses, the rank odor of fathers whose muslin shirts, rolled to the elbows, hadn’t been washed since the last river crossing, and constant dust permeating the last wagons in line with their patched tops that once had been gleaming white canvas.
In the bottom of the draw, I found giant wildrye grass, basin big sagebrush, rabbitbrush, spiny hop sage, flowers of red Indian paintbrush, blue sand penstemons and yellow Oregon sunshine but also an array of invasive plants like cheatgrass and tumble mustard. Swales in the ground are traces of the wagon route over Keeney Pass. Faded interpretive signs inspire. They tell tales of pioneers, stories etched on public lands, where wagon wheels once rolled.
Andrew Gulliford, an award-winning author and editor, is a professor of history at Fort Lewis College. Reach him at andy@agulliford.com.
