David Dary - The Oregon Trail: An American Saga

Table of Contents

To the memory of those pioneers
who traveled the Oregon Trail

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, howeverpatient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the mostminute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning oruntrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of thetime. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character,habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were,a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

Francis Parkman

Maps

Introduction

The Oregon Trail probably should be called the Oregon-California-Utah-Colorado-Nevada-Montana-and-Other-Points-West Trail, because from the 1840s until 1869 travelers used all or part of it to reach these places at one time or another. It began, however, as the road to Oregon, and even though many travelers soon followed much of it west to California or someplace other than Oregon, it is best remembered today as the Oregon Trail, and that is what I call it between these covers.

To write that the Oregon Trail was not a trail may surprise some readers. While it did begin as a trail, by the middle 1840s it was becoming a well-worn road as large numbers of people with their wagons followed it west from the Missouri River. For travelers bound for Oregon or California, it was a journey of more than 2,000 miles, and they averaged about three miles per hour in their wagons drawn by oxen, some by mules or horses. It took about four and a half months for emigrants to reach Oregon or California. For others the journey was longer. The travel time was less for Mormons bound for Salt Lake City, or gold-seekers bound later for Colorado, Idaho, and Montana. Of course, some people never reached their destinations. Many died from cholera, other illness, or accident. Their graves, some marked but many unmarked, still lie along what remains of the roads in the corridor they followed. For those who completed their overland journeys, the trip was shorter than for those who traveled by ship around Cape Horn from the East Coast. It took them about six months to reach California or Oregon.

During the years of peak travel, from 1843 until the early 1850s, the Oregon Trail was followed by at least a quarter of a million people who wanted to reach Oregon or California. Others, heading for Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Montana, and other points in the West, used much of the road until 1869, when the transcontinental railroad was completed. Until then the Oregon Trail was the major overland route from the Missouri River to the Pacific coast. Independence, Missouri, was the first starting point for emigrants, but in time other towns along the Missouri River also became jumping-off points. From each place, trails were blazed to the principal corridor of travel along the Platte River in modern Nebraska, and like roads anywhere, intersections or junctions with other trails developed, either running to the Oregon Trail or starting from it. Some of these trails were called cutoffs. Today we call them shortcuts.

The purpose of this book is to chronicle the saga of the roads history from long before it came into being to the present day, and to relate its history and the stories of the people involved, including explorers, Indians, fur traders, trappers, traders, emigrants, gold-seekers, soldiers, pleasure-seekers, freighters, those who carried the mail, and finally the turnarounds, those people who gave up and returned east for one reason or another.

Unlike the self-sufficient mountain men, fur traders, and other individualists in the frontier West, most of the thousands of emigrants were more ordinary men, women, and children who banded together and traveled in moving communities on wheels to cross the plains, prairies, mountains, and deserts to reach their promised lands. For many it was a monumental event in their lives. More than 2,000 travelers kept diaries or journals or later wrote down their recollections, probably sensing that their experiences were of historic importance. They were important, but it is doubtful that any of them realized they were participating in the longest voluntary migration in history. Their experiences have provided historians, fiction writers, and makers of Hollywood films and television shows with countless stories that capture the romance, hardships, and emotions of the people going west.

Today one can fly to the same destinations reached by the emigrants in a few hours or leisurely make the drive by auto from the Missouri River westward in a matter of days. Modern highways follow or parallel many of the roads the emigrants traveled in their wagons, with their handcarts, by horse or mule, or by walking. Traveling the route today by auto and visiting the historical sites gives one a true appreciation of the land they crossed, the hardships they overcame, and what they accomplished in helping to settle the American West. The story is truly an American saga.

David Dary
Along Imhoff Creek
Norman, Oklahoma

CHAPTER ONE

THE EXPLORATION OF OREGON

One mans exploration is another mans home ground.

Anonymous

BEFORE THE FIRST Europeans arrived, people had lived in Oregon for more than 10,000 years. Anthropologists believe as many as 180,000 natives in about 125 tribes once made modern Oregon their home. Of these the best known today are the Chinooks, who lived along the lower Columbia River and on the narrow coastal plains between the rugged Cascade Mountains and the Pacific Ocean from Shoalwater Bay, north of the Columbia, to Tillamook Head, about fifty miles south of the rivers mouth. They also ranged inland from the mouth of the Columbia to a large rapids first called The Dalles by French-Canadian trappers, who gave it a French name meaning rapids of a river going through a narrow gorge.

The Chinooks, named for the warm, moist southwest wind blowing in from the Pacific Ocean, included the Cooniac, Cascade, Clatsop, Clackamas, Multnomah, and Wasco tribes, which all spoke the same language. Many lived in multifamily cedar-plank houses forty to sixty feet long and twenty feet wide that were roofed with bark or boards. Trading with other tribes was their pleasure. Their livelihood came from fishing, hunting, and gathering nuts, berries, and plant food. They hunted game with bows and arrows, and they were skilled boat builders, shaping their canoes from single cedar logs. Their smallest canoe carried only one person and the largest as many as sixty. Using a homemade twine seine made from nettles, the crew of a large canoe could catch two tons of salmon on a single outgoing tide on the Columbia River.

The Chinook society was highly stratified and based on voluntary cooperation and association. Socially, men were considered superior to women, which was reflected in what women woreoften nothing at all, although both sexes wore furs for warmth in the winter. They flattened the temples of their childrens heads with headboards on their cradleboards. They were among the wealthiest natives north of Mexico, so wealthy that they could afford to devote two months each winter to artistic and spiritual pursuits. Their culture was rich.1