# Oregon Historical Quarterly/Volume 1/The Oregon Trail

This article is discussed here: Oregon Historical Quarterly/Volume 42/Debt of Pacific Northwest to Dr. Joseph Schafer
THE OREGON TRAIL.
As the American people come to realize that their distinctively national achievement so far, next to that of maintaining a national integrity, has been that of preempting and subduing an adequate dominion and home for a civilization they will revere the services of those ​who made the transcontinental migrations in the thirties, forties and fifties. The glory that belongs to the participants in those migrations is the peculiar birthright of the patriotic Oregonian. The passage from the Atlantic slope to the Pacific of these first American households bearing the best embers of western civilization must ever stand as a momentous event in the annals of time.
But the movement has not yet, even in its outward aspects, been viewed as a whole. To mark off its limits in time, in routes taken, in numbers and population elements involved; to note the main motives, the forms of characteristic experiences; in a word to make, as it were, a composite view with relation to national history as a background, would seem to be the first step for realizing the due appreciation of the significance of the work of the Oregon pioneers. A sketch of the outlines of the movement in its more salient features, then, is what is attempted here, with the hope that such setting forth of the movement as a whole, with outlines more or less closely defined, will lead to its being brought fully into relation with the general course of events of American history. Until the story of the Oregon movement is thus set forth, the historians of our national life cannot weave it into its proper conspicuous relations in their narratives. It has no doubt been largely due to this lack if the story of this pioneer achievement in available form that a somewhat undue estimate of Doctor Whitman's services and the acceptance of mythical accretions to them have come about. The Whitman story was early available and was made to do service in accounting for a larger outcome than facts warranted.
​The Oregon migrations effected at one sweep a two thousand-mile extension of the Aryan movement westward in the occupation of the north temperate zone "a far-flung': outpost of occupation and settlement. To appreciate the boldness, intrepidity and consummate effectiveness of such pioneering we have but to note that no previous extension had compassed one-fourth this distance. Nor were the conditions in this instance easy. One continuous stretch of Indian country infested with most formidable predatory tribes had to be passed through. Conditions approximating those of a desert had to be faced during a large part of the migration. There were swift rivers to ford or ferry, and three mountain ranges to scale. Only one form of the usual difficulties of pioneer road-making did not appear. There were no extensive forests to penetrate except on the ridges of the Blue and the Cascade Mountains.
The settlements of the blue grass region of Kentucky, and the Nashville district, in Western Tennessee, were, when first made, the most isolated from the main body of the American people. Yet, these had less than a fourhundred mile stretch between them and the settled region of the Atlantic slope. No other outward movement of Aryan people ever covered anything like the distance made by the Oregon pioneers on the Oregon trail . Measured by the sea voyage, the Oregon settlements were a leap of seventeen thousand miles.
Two years ago there appeared a book of five hundred and twenty-nine pages written by Colonels Henry Inman and William F. Cody, bearing the title, "The Great Salt Lake Trail." In its preface there is to be found the following comment on its title: "Over this historical highway the Mormons made their lonely hegira. * * * ​Over this route, also, were made those world renowned expeditions by Fremont, Stansbury, Lander, and others of lesser fame, to the heart of the Rocky Mountains, and beyond, to the blue shores of the Pacific Ocean. Over the same trackless waste the pony express executed those marvelous feats in annihilating distance, and the once famous overland stage lumbered along through the seemingly interminable desert of sage brush and alkali dust avant-courieres of the telegraph and the railroad."
The body of the book touches upon topics ranging in time from Jonathan Carver's explorations in 1766-'68 to the building of the Union Pacific Railroad. Its map lays "The Old Salt Lake Trail" exactly on the route of the Oregon trail as far as Fort Bridger, in Southwestern Wyoming. But the Oregon migrations are not hinted at by a single word in the body of the book. The authors' account of them could not have been crowded out by more weighty matters, as all the disjointed fragments of Indian hunting and fighting and drunken carousal, whether happening on the line of the trail or not, are crowded in. Either the story of the Oregon movement during the thirties, forties and fifties was absolutely unknown to Colonels Inman and Cody, or, if known, thought worthy of relegation to oblivion by them. In interviews last summer with people living along the line of the trail, only those whose experiences extended back to the time of the Oregon migrations recognized the trail as the Oregon trail. It was always the "California trail" or the "Mormon trail."
The transcontinental movement as a march of civilization to the west shore of the continent was in its incipiency a missionary enterprise.. There is hardly any doubt, however, but that the home-seeking pioneer would have been on the way just as soon without the initiative of the missionary heroes and heroines. It is, nevertheless, the lasting glory of the Presbyterian and Congregational denominations that under the auspices of their missionary board the first American families successfully made the passage that was to sweep such a marvelous movement into its train. The Methodist Episcopal missionary enterprise antedated all others and played a conspicuous role in the political organization of the Oregon community, but it was not first in setting up the American home. So long as it lacked that it could not bear an American civilization, which was the crucial matter. It was Whitman who demonstrated the possibility of taking households across the plains, and this achievement, too, was a decisive initiative.
But how did the impulse to make this dangerous and arduous journey to the then far-off wilderness of Oregon originate with the missionary and the homeseeking pioneers? The inception of the Oregon move​ment in both its missionary and its pioneering aspects is best understood when viewed as outbursts of missionary zeal and energy and pioneer daring and restlessness from vast stores of potential missionary and pioneer spirit existing in this country in the thirties. Missionary activity in the direction of Oregon was liberated by something like a spark, or, to change the metaphor, by a "long-distance' "Macedonian cry.' A delegation of four Nez Perces Indians from the upper waters of the Columbia arrived in St. Louis in 1832 in search of "the white man's Book of Heaven.' An account of this singularly unique mission was published in the newspapers of the time. The story was made all the more effective and thrilling, with those of deep religious sensibilities, through its including what purported to be a verbatim report of a most pathetic farewell address made in General Clark's office by one of the two surviving members of this mission.
The closing passage of the speech, as it has been handed down, is as follows:
"We are going back the long, sad trail to our people. When we tell them, after one more snow, in the big council that we did not bring the Book, no word will be spoken by our old men, nor by our young braves. One by one they will rise up and go out in silence. Our people will die in darkness, and they will go on the long path to other hunting grounds. No white man will go with them, and no Book of Heaven to make the way plain. We have no more words."
The spirit that materialized in the Oregon pioneer movement was not kindled by any special spark like that which called forth the missionary enterprises. Nor was it aroused by anything like the cry of gold that brought on the mad rush to California in '49 and the early fifties. The Oregon migrations were the outcome of cool, calm, reasoned determination. This characterized the movement collectively as well as individually.
In a sense, the Oregon movement was in preparation from the time when in 1636 Puritan congregations were led by Hooker and others from the vicinity of Boston westward through the forests to the banks of the Connecticut. This initial western movement was communicated along the Atlantic coast settlements by the ScotchIrish crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains in Pennsylvania, and by the Virginians penetrating to the Shenandoah Valley. Some would say that an instinct to move west has been growing in strength among civilized peoples since about 1000 B. C., when the Phoenicians moved west on the Medeterranean to found Carthage, and the Greeks to plant colonies in southern Italy and at Marseilles.
Knowledge of a "new country" was sure to create in them an almost irrepressible longing to move on. Such natures as these furnished the best culture conditions in which to develop an Oregon movement with the reports explorers and travelers brought from the far Pacific Coast region. Such Oregon material had early been disseminated among these susceptible people. The journal of the Lewis and Clark expedition was published in 1814 and distributed far and wide as a government document. Pioneers speak of reading it as boys and of becoming permanently interested in the Oregon Country. The journal of Patrick Gass, a sergeant in the company of Lewis and Clark, fell into the hands of others and stirred their imaginations. From 1817 on until 1832 Hall J. Kelley, a Boston schoolmaster, was compiling and distributing information designed to awaken a desire to join in a movement to establish a civilized community in Oregon. His society is said to have had thirty-seven agents scattered through the union. An Oregon question became a subject of negotiation between Great Britain and the United States in 1818. These negotiations were renewed in 1824, 1827 and 1842. The occupation of Oregon was proposed in congress in 1821. The subject was kept before congress almost continuously until 1827, and again from 1837 on. The proposed legislation elicited exhaustive reports and warm discussions, which were published in the newspapers of the land. The bill of Dr. Lewis F. Linn, senator from Misouri, introduced in 1842, with its provision for a grant of six hundred and forty acres of land to every actual male settler, was naturally a most potent cause of resolutions to go to Oregon. The fact that during all these years Great Britain disputed our ​right to claim the whole of the Oregon Country only added to the ardor of some who thought of going thither.
The facts so far marshalled on the origin of the pioneer movement to Oregon disclose the existence of a people in the Mississippi Valley competent for the undertaking, and on general principles not disinclined towards it, whose thought, moreover, had been arrested by some ​unique advantages claimed for the Oregon country. But the Oregon movement, like most migrations, has most light thrown on its origin and motive by an inquiry into the conditions that made the old home undesirable, and in some cases even unbearable.
Not a few came from Missouri, Kentucky and other border slave states because they were not in sympathy with the institution of slavery. Their aversion to slave owning placed them at a great disadvantage in those states. Their families were not recognized as socially the equals of the more influential portion of society. They were accustomed to labor, and slavery brought a stigma upon labor. In the cultivation of tobacco and hemp, the main articles of export, the owner of slave labor had a decided advantage. The employer of free labor found it exceedingly difficult to make ends meet. Snubbed in a social way, worsted in industrial competition, in individual cases they were even mobbed when they tried to express their anti-slavery sentiments at the polls. Some of the more nervous of the slave-owning population, too, were impelled to seek relief in the same movement from the constant dread of a negro insurrection.
The "fever and ague" was a dread visitant to very many engaged in turning over the virgin soil of the Mississippi Valley. In Oregon they would be free from this curse, so the "fever and ague," with not a few, brought on the "Oregon fever." The frequent recurrence of the awful scourge of the cholera in the towns of the middle west in the late forties and early fifties made many, in the hope of safety, more than willing to brave the dangers and hardships of the journey to Oregon. The warning signals of approaching old age no doubt were the deciding influence with some who set out as modern ​
Monetary disturbances had made business stagnant all over the country from 1837 to 1841. Many had gone to the wall, and had been compelled to see their homes turned over to others. The hard times were felt keenest in the then farthest west. They were so far inland that commercial intercourse with the rest of the world was almost totally cut off. What traffic they had was carried on by slow, laborious and expensive processes. Railroad building had not progressed so as to give a hope, hardly even an intimation, of its wonderful solution of the problem of maintaining a high civilization far inland. By going to Oregon they would, as they thought of it, again be on the open shores of the greater sea, within easy reach of the highway of the civilizations of the world. Not often, perhaps, were their motives formulated. These were allowed to rest in their minds in the most naive form of impulse. Col. Geo. B. Currey, in his "Occasional Address': before the Pioneer Association, in 1887, endorses the following as the best reason he ever got. It was, as he says, "from a genuine westerner," who said he came "because the thing wasn't fenced in, and nobody dared to keep him out."
The western border of Missouri was the natural jumping off place for the plunge into the wilderness. The settlements there had extended out like a plank beyond the line of the border elsewhere. The Ohio and the Missouri, with a short stretch of the Mississippi, had furnished the line of least resistance to the westward movement.
Each recurring spring tide from 1842 on witnessed the gathering of hosts at points on the Missouri, from Independence, near the confluence of the Kansas with the Missouri, north to what is now Council Bluffs. They ​were enamored with one idea, that of making homes in far away Oregon. This part of the border was also the starting line for the California and the Mormon migrations. The California movement was only sporadic until 1849. This was seven years after the Oregon movement had become regular. The Mormons first struck across the continent in 1847.
Independence and Westport, just south of the Missouri's great bend to the east, were the gateway of the earliest regular travel and traffic across the plains. These towns are now the suburbs of Kansas City. The Oregon migrations" of 1842 and 1843 were formed exclusively in this vicinity. The old Santa Fe trail led by these settlements. From these points, too, the fur trading companies conducted expeditions annually to the upper waters of the Green River beyond the Rocky Mountains. The route was up the south side of the Kansas River some fifty miles, then turning to the right, the river was forded or ferried and a general northwest course adhered to, more direct for Oregon.
Steamboating on the treacherous Missouri during those spring seasons while the tide of emigration was strongly westward set is given a lurid hue in the journals of the emigrants. The river route was the natural one for all coming from Ohio and the states to the east, also for many coming from Indiana.
One entry made during this part of the trip in 1852 reads as follows: "We have a bar on our boat, too, and that is visited about as often as any other place I know of. A son of temperance is a strange animal on this river, I can assure you. I think there are three or four sons on the boat, and- the rest, about five hundred people, like a dram as often as I would like to drink a little water." * * * We get a little scared sometimes, for we hear of so many boats blowing up. There was another boat blown up at Lexington last Saturday and killed one hundred and fifty persons, the most of which were emigrants for California and Oregon. These things make us feel pretty squally, I can assure you, but it is not the way to be scared beforehand. So we boost our spirits up and push on. * * * Got to Lexington at 12 o'clock. There we found the wrecks of the boat that blew up five days ago. There were about two hundred people aboard, and the nearest we could learn about forty persons escaped unhurt, about forty were wounded and the balance were killed."
The man who kept this journal fitted out with a company at Saint Joseph. The company planned to drive up the east side of the Missouri and cross at old Fort Kearney. But, finding the roads too bad on that route, they made for a ferry ten miles north of Saint Joseph. ​I quote FROM his account of their experiences in getting across the river: "Went up to the ferry. Mr. H—'s and Mr. S—'s wagons went over safe. Then Mr. S—'s family wagon and five yoke of cattle and all of Mr. S—'s family except two boys went on the ferry boat, and when they were about one-half way across the boat began to sink. They tried to drive the cattle off, but could not in time to save the boat from sinking. My family are still on the east side and I—S— with his teams. We witnessed the scene and could do nothing. Mrs. S— and the baby and next youngest were all under water, but the men of the boat got into the river and took them out, and the rest of the family got upon the wagon cover and saved themselves from drowning. A Mr. r— jumped overboard and thought he could swim to shore, but was drowned. He was one of Mr.—S 's hired hands. By the assistance of one of the other boats the rest were saved, but we thought from where we were that it was impossible that they could all be saved. Well, I paid a man fifteen cents for taking my wife and little children across in a skiff. They have no skiff at the ferry, but they have three good ferryboats that they work by hand. But the people here are as near heathens as they can be, and they go for shaving the emigrants, and then they spend it for whiskey and get drunk and roll in it. But we are all over on the west shore of the Missouri and in Indian terriority."
On the whole, those home-seeking pioneers, as they lay encamped on the banks of the Missouri, could congratulate themselves that no specially stupendous natural obstacles had been interposed in that immense stretch that lay between them and their destination. There was only the inter minableness of it, and the facts that it was to be entered upon while the fierce pelting spring storms of wind, rain and hail were liable to be of daily and nightly occurrence; that muddy sloughs would cause breakdowns, and freshet-swollen streams would be fraught with danger; that there would then be four months in which the fierce burning, blistering sun would have them at its mercy, and a dense, stifling dust would enhance their misery during the midday hours to the point of wretchedness, and no bathroom in the evening in which to find relief; that in the later and almost final days of the journey they would probably be exposed in approximate nakedness to the searching blasts of the oncoming winter, fortunate if they were not caught and held fast in mountain snows. Withal, they knew it would be a lumbering trudge with ox teams that would take them all summer and far into the autumn.
Each recurring spring season family or neighborhood groups who had determined to try their fortunes in Oregon would move out to one of the points of departure on the Missouri border. They would soon find themselves a part of a larger aggregation. Generally there was no more prearrangement for this meeting than there is ​among birds that flock for a migration. All who constituted the company from any one point had simply selected the same jumping off place.
When the grass had grown abundant enough to furnish subsistence for their stock and draft animals, those who were ready with their outfit would begin to file out on the prairie trails converging upon the main Oregon road. After having traveled a day or two a halt was called by those in advance to await the coming up of others who proposed to undertake the same trip with themselves. The American instinct for organization would then assert itself, and there was occasion for its activity. They were in an Indian country. It was not wise to tempt the predatory propensities of the savages by too much straggling in their traveling or by too much unwariness in guarding their cattle and horses. In order to avoid molestation by prowling bands of Pawnees, Otoes, Cheyennes and Sioux, through whose ranges the trail east of the Rockies passed, it was necessary to travel in companies of some size and with such discipline as to be able to establish an effective guard at night and to make some demonstration of force when encountering considerable bands of Indian warriors.
The records of the migrations give ample corroboration to the truth of the adage, "Uneasy lies the head, etc.," and yet these privately penned diaries disclose comparatively little bickering or unwholesome feeling, notwithstanding the severe strain human nature was under in the conditions of this four, five, and sometimes six months' passage. Whenever conditions developed making advisable a division of the body into two or more, the division was made, and all was smooth again. The documentary material printed in this number of the Quarterly throws light on this phase of their experience and depicts the unique proceedings of the pioneers of 1843 in effecting an organization.
The type of the transcontinental pioneer changed materially after the gold-seeker was in the majority. From 1849 on the diarist's account is not devoid of the tragical. "These plains try and tell all the dark spots in men," says Rev. Jesse Moreland in his journal of the trip from Tennessee to Oregon in 1852. He describes ​evidence of three executions for murder by hanging. He says: "As they had nothing to make a gallows out of, they took two wagon tongues, put them point to point and set a chair in the middle, and the man stood on the chair till the rope was tied, and then the chair was taken from under him. This is the third we have heard of being hanged."
Before 1849, while the Oregon movement still constituted the great part of the transcontinental travel, and a fierce commercial spirit was not yet dominant, the humanity of the pioneers seemed to stand remarkably well the strain incident to the experiences on the plains. Their journals do not reveal half the irritation and demoralization that the accounts of Parkman and of Coke do in companies that had vastly better outfits and were passing over the same routes.
The average company of immigrants in pulling through the miry sloughs of the Missouri bottom lands in early spring, with only partly broken ox teams, would break a wagon tongue, an axle tree, or a wheel, and suffer more or less exasperating delay. The fierce spring storms of rain and hail would play havoc with their tent coverings, and drench and pelt all who must stand outside to prevent the teams and stock from stampeding. These freshets would make impassable, for the time being, the numerous streams of the Kansas and Nebraska prairies. With the feeling that they must not over-exert their teams mere trifles even were allowed to delay them during the first four or five hundred miles of the journey.
Especially the migration of 1849, and to some degree those of .1850 and 1852, were in deepest dismay over the presence among them of the dreadful scourge of cholera. The trail was lined in places along the south side of the Platte through the width of rods with mounds of freshly made graves after these migrations had passed. The Hon. F. A. Chenoweth, in his "Occasional Address' before the Oregon Pioneer Association, in 1882, gives the following account of the ravages of the cholera among the trains of 1849:
"But the incidents of hardship which I have noticed were the merest trifles compared to the terrible calamity that marked with sadness and trailed in deep desolation over that ill-fated emigration. Very soon after the assembled throng took up its march over the plains the terrible wave of cholera struck them in a way to carry utmost terror and dismay into all parts of the moving mass.
The number of fatally stricken, after the smoke and dust were cleared away, was not numerically so frightful as appeared to those who were in the midst of it. But the name "cholera' in a multitude unorganized and unnumbered is like a leak in the bottom of a ship whose decks are thronged with passengers. The disturbed waters of the ocean, the angry elements of nature, when aroused to fury, are but faint illustrations of the terrorstricken mass of humanity, when in their midst are falling with great rapidity their comrades the strong, the young and the old the strength and vigor of youth melting away before an unseen foe. All this filled our ranks with the utmost terror and gloom. This terrible malady seemed to spend its most deadly force on the flat prairie east of and about Fort Laramie.
One of the appalling effects of this disease was to ​cause the most devoted friends to desert, in case of attack, the fallen one. Many a stout and powerful man fought the last battle alone on the prairie. When the rough hand of the cholera was laid upon families they rarely had either the assistance or the sympathy of their neighbors or traveling companions.
There was one feature mixed with all this terror that afforded some degree of relief, and that was that there was no case of lingering suffering. When attacked, a single day ordinarily ended the strife in death or recovery. Avast amount of wagons, with beds and blankets, were left by the roadside, which no man, not even an Indian, would approach or touch through fear of the unknown, unseen destroyer.
While there were sad instances of comrades deserting comrades in this hour of extreme trial, I can not pass this point of my story without stating that there were many instances of heroic devotion to the sick, when such attention was regarded as almost equivalent to the offering up of the well and healthy for the mere hope of saving the sick and dying."
Not a few who had purposed to go to California that year turned off on the Oregon road to escape the contagion which the dense crowd seemed to afford this disease. Excepting in these cholera years and in 1847 there were only infrequent cases of mountain fever and forms of dysentery that were developed in the alkali regions of the mountains.
The sun's rays became more and more scorching in their fierceness, the plains assumed a dull, leaden grayish aspect. The sagebrush and cactus took the place of the waving grass. The burning sand and stifling dust became deeper. These the west wind would raise into ​a cloud continuous from morning until night. This cloud of sand and dust particles beating against them at a terrific velocity they had to face all day. Soon eyes and lips were sore. To relieve the uncomfortable feeling that the parching air gave the lips they would unwisely be moistened and the soreness thus extended and deepened. Soon everything was obdurately begrimed. Rags then were in evidence. Shoes worn so as to no longer protect the feet. In the dry, scorching air the wagons would develop loose joints and lose their tires.
The monotony was relieved by lying by a day now and then during which the women would wash and mend the clothes and the men repair wagons and hunt buffalo, the meat of which would be jerked to furnish a supply after they had passed beyond the limits of the buffalo country. The buffalo did not commonly range west of the Lower Sweetwater.
There was still another condition in which the spirit of the buffalo made the pioneer show deference to it. This happened when a great horde of buffalo was on a stampede bearing down upon an emigrant train that happened to be passing across its trail. The moment was almost enough to bring dismay to the pioneer. Either the teams of the train were urged into something of a stampede to get out of line of the horde's advance, or a corral was formed and volleys fired into the impending mass to divide it so as to leave the corral a safe island between a destructive flood rolling by on either hand.
Distressing accidents must almost of necessity befall them from their carrying their loaded guns commingled with household goods on their wagons. It is not strange that at least half of the journals should have records of fatalities thus caused. Under the law of mathematical probabilities, with the frequent occasion there was to remove gun or blanket thus intermixed, while the members of the family were standing around the wagon, accidents must occur. The small boy of the family during this four or five months' trip had very many occasions to clamber out of and into the wagon while it was in motion. He, too, would come to grief ​with a broken leg. Any ordinary fracture, however, even though there were no surgeon at hand, would be attended to, so that no deformity resulted. If the case was one seeming to require an amputation "a butcher knife and an old dull hand saw r ' were improvised as surgical instruments. But I have not found that a patient survived such an operation and got well. The other great epochal events of family life, marriages and births, were not infrequent on the trail, and seemed to cause little distraction.
The experiences of the pioneers in crossing the rivers in the line of the trail were very diverse. It is reported of one of the migrations that they were not compelled to ferry until they reached the Des Chutes in Oregon. But the migration of 1844 had a serious time even with the Black Vermillion and Big Blue, tributaries of the Kansas. Where logs were available they were hollowed out and catamaran rafts made so as to fit the wheels of a wagon. Sometimes the best wagon boxes would be selected and caulked and used as flatboats. Where buffalo skins were plentiful they would be stretched around the wagon box to make it water-tight. In later stages of the journey, after their teams were more reliable, it was a common practice to raise the wagon beds several inches above the bolsters, if the depth of the stream required it, couple several teams into a train with the most reliable in front on a lead-rope, and drivers along the down-stream side of the other teams. They would then ford as trains. After the rush in 1849 ferries were established at the more important crossings, whose owners reaped rich harvests.
​Data for determining the numbers that came across the plains to Oregon during the successive years are as yet very unsatisfactory. The estimates given below for 1842 and 1843 are well founded, but the others, especially from 1847 on, are from no very tangible basis. At the close of 1841 the Americans in Oregon numbered possibly four hundred.
The above figures are taken quite closely from those given by Elwood Evans in his address before the Pioneer Association in 1877. I make the immigration of 1844, however, seven hundred, instead of four hundred and seventy-five, as he gives it.
No doubt this one summer on the plains was an ordeal under which some sensitive natures were strained and weakened for life. It may be, too, that living for five or six months, as families, on the simplest, barest necessities of life, fixed standards of living lower than they otherwise would have been. The effect, however, on strong, resourceful natures of these months on the plains could not have been other than salutary. The pioneers, when they started, were most distinctively American in their characteristics. As such they needed to be socialized. No better school could have been devised than the organization and regimen of the trip across the plains for socializing their natures.
F. G. YOUNG.