page_title: Oregon Trail Memorial half dollar
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Oregon Trail Memorial half dollar / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: American Oregon Trail pioneer and writer Ezra Meeker (1830-1928)
context_page_description: The Oregon Trail Memorial half dollar was a fifty-cent piece struck intermittently by the United States Bureau of the Mint between 1926 and 1939. The coin was designed by Laura Gardin Fraser and James Earle Fraser, and commemorates those who traveled the Oregon Trail and settled the Pacific Coast of the United States in the mid-19th century. Struck over a lengthy period in small numbers per year, the many varieties produced came to be considered a ripoff by coin collectors, and led to the end, for the time, of the commemorative coin series.
  Ohio-born Ezra Meeker had traveled the Trail with his family in 1852 and spent the final two decades of his long life before his death in 1928 publicizing the Oregon Trail, that it should not be forgotten. In 1926, at age 95, he appeared before a Senate committee, requesting that the government issue a commemorative coin that could be sold to raise money for markers to show where the Trail had been. The coin had originally been thought of by Idahoans, led by Dr. Minnie Howard, seeking to further preservation work at Fort Hall; Meeker broadened the idea.
context_section_description: In the middle years of the 19th century, before the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 made travel easier, hundreds of thousands of people journeyed along the Oregon Trail to settle the Far West of the United States.  Not all who began the journey reached their destination as there was much suffering and death along the way—by one estimate, 20,000 people lie in unmarked graves.
  Ohio-born farmer Ezra Meeker (1830–1928) traveled the Oregon Trail in 1852; he and his young wife and infant child went by ox-drawn wagon from Iowa to Oregon Territory.  In his old age, he came to believe that the Oregon Trail, and the sacrifice of those who had died along it, were being forgotten.  Amid considerable publicity as one of the last survivors of the pioneers who had blazed the way west, Meeker retraced his route along the Trail between 1906 and 1908.  The Trail had in some places disappeared, swallowed up by town and farm, and in his journeys, he sought to find where he had passed, seeking to have historical markers erected.  He took his ox team and wagon across the nation to publicize his cause, parking his rig in front of the White House where he met President Theodore Roosevelt. In New York, he crossed the Brooklyn Bridge.  In 1910, he and his oxen participated in the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena.  In the succeeding years, he traveled the route by oxcart, automobile, and, at age 93 in 1924, airplane, attempting to further his cause, and seeking federal recognition and funding for his efforts.
caption: Ezra Meeker in 1921 at age 90
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