But the real thrust westward came the following year, when the Oregon Trail took on a new significance thanks to the so-called Great Emigration.īy May 13, 1843, more than 900 emigrants bound for Oregon were encamped on the prairie at Fitzhugh’s Mill, several miles from Independence, preparing to embark, dividing into companies, electing wagon masters and engaging veteran and self-proclaimed frontiersmen who professed to know the country to guide them. Elijah White, the newly appointed Indian agent in Oregon, successfully led 125 men, women and children there. In his Journal, Bidwell described the famous landmarks that would impress almost all Oregon Trail travelers-Courthouse Rock, Chimney Rock, Scotts Bluff, Fort Laramie and Independence Rock. At Soda Springs (in what is now southwest Idaho) one contingent split off for Oregon. The next year, John Bidwell and John Bartleson traveled what would later be christened the Oregon Trail on the first planned overland emigration west to California. The wagon trip ended at Fort Walla Walla, after which they took boats down the Columbia River to the Willamette River valley. Meek and Newell managed to get the first wheeled vehicles over the Blue Mountains. These two mountain men rigged up some wobbly wagons and trained “squaw ponies” to pull them.
Many of these restless souls had heard of the success of Joe Meek and his friend Bob Newell, who had made it to Oregon in 1840. “And there was so much motion in it the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.” “As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea,” wrote novelist Willa Cather in My Antonia. It was as if the land itself were pulling the people westward. Vast and unclaimed riches far to the west, across the Great Plains, beckoned. Above all, they were restless-once a farm had been tamed, the narrow horizons of the backwoods communities closed around them. 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.” 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. What Was It Really Like on the Oregon Trail? | HistoryNet Close
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