Rebecca Stefoff - Surviving the Oregon Trail. Stories in American History

Together the emigrants would tame the wild landscapes of the Pacific Northwest and California.

In the nineteenth century, over half a million men, women, and children traveled west on the Oregon Trail. Stretching two thousand miles from Independence, Missouri to the Pacific Northwest, the Oregon Trail was the longest overland route used in the westward expansion.

Crossing mountains and deserts, fighting disease, short of both food and water, pioneers endured many hardships to follow the trail west with their hopes and dreams of seeking fortunes in the unsettled west.

In Surviving the Oregon Trail: Stories in American History, author Rebecca Stefoff traces the roots of the Oregon and California Trails back to the seventeenth century, telling the stories of those who left the security and comfort of their homes, to endure months of hard travel in the hope of a new life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rebecca Stefoff is the author of many books for young readers including several other works dealing with settling of the American West. Stefoff lives in the Pacific Northwest and takes special interest in the geography and history of the region.

Part of the Oregon Trail, as seen in Nebraska.

When the first light of sunrise appeared in the sky, gunshots rang out over the silent prairie. The shots were a signal, telling people to wake up. Another day had begun. It was the summer of 1843, and one thousand people were traveling west across America in the first large wagon train to travel the Oregon Trail.

Jesse Applegate, one of the leaders of the wagon train, told how the morning signal turned the sleeping camp into a bustle of activity. People streamed out of every wagon and tent. Smoke from breakfast fires began to rise and float away in the morning air. Sixty men spread out from the circle of wagons. Their job was to gather the cattle and horses that had wandered away from the wagons during the night. It would take the men several hours to round up all the animals and get them into line with the wagons.

From 6 to 7 oclock is a busy time, wrote Applegate. During this time the travelers had to eat breakfast, take down their tents, load their wagons, and hitch the teams of oxen to the wagons. Everyone hurried to finish these chores by seven oclock. People who were not ready when the wagon train leader sounded the signal to march would end up at the rear of the wagon train. No one wanted to be there. In dry weather the animals and wagons ahead kicked up choking clouds of dust. In wet weather they churned the path into muddy, sloppy ruts. Either way, the people at the end of the line had to struggle through the mess made by the wagons in front.

On the stroke of seven, a horn call sounded, loud and clear, from the front of the long line. Whips cracked, oxen pulled at their yokes, and one by one the wagons jolted into motion. Slowly the wagon train stretched out until it formed a long line crawling across the landscape, two to four wagons abreast.

With luck the travelers might cover twenty miles that daybut they had many miles still to go. They were less than halfway through their 2,200-mile journey, and they could not afford to lose time. If they moved too slowly, they might run out of food in the barren deserts ahead. If they did not reach their destination before the winter snows began to fall, they risked being trapped in the high, snowbound passes of the western mountains.

Why did thousands of men, women, and children make such a difficult, dangerous journey? The answer is Oregon Fever. In the middle of the 1800s, Americans were excited about what they called the Oregon country. The Oregon country was a big place. When Applegate and other people of his time spoke of Oregon, they meant the land that later became the states of Idaho and Washington and part of Wyoming as well as the state of Oregon.

Since the late 1700s, Americans had been reading and hearing about the Oregon country. Explorers who had been to Oregon talked about the mild climate and fertile soil of the Willamette Valley, close to the Pacific coast. These travelers said that rivers in Oregon were full of fish. Fruit and berries grew everywhere. Flowers bloomed all year long. Trees were so huge that six men linking hands could not reach around their trunks. Just one of these mighty trees would produce more than enough timber to build a house.

A few hardy pioneers had already gone west to Oregon. They sent back word of the routes they had followed across the vast middle of North America, which was almost completely unexplored at that time. Soon hundreds of people were leaving their homes east of the Mississippi River to seek a better life in Oregon. Newspapers all over the eastern United States described the Oregon Fever that was sweeping the country. A young Missouri girl named Martha Gay never forgot the day her father caught the Western fever. Years later she wrote:

Gay, Applegate, and all the others who went west to Oregon were called emigrants. Emigrants are people who emigrate, or leave their native country. The Americans who went to Oregon truly were emigrants, for they were leaving the United States to settle in a territory that did not yet belong to any country. Like the English, Spanish, and French colonists who had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to build settlements in the Americas, the emigrants of the Oregon Trail set out across thousands of empty miles to build new communities on a distant shore.

Three great events shaped the history of the United States in the nineteenth century. One of these events was the Civil War, which nearly tore the young nation apart and took the lives of more than half a million men. The next event was the Industrial Revolution, which brought factories and workers to American cities and began changing the United States from a farming nation into an industrial nation. The third great event of the century was the settlement of the far West, which moved the western border of the United States to the Pacific Ocean and more than doubled the countrys size. Some historians think that this westward expansion was even more important in the nations history than the Civil War or the Industrial Revolution.

Emigrants Crossing the Plains is a famous engraving by Felix Darley and Henry Bryan Hall. It is a dramatic depiction of what life was like on the Oregon Trail.

Americans of the nineteenth century wanted to spread out across the land. Many of them, or their parents or grandparents, had come to America so that they could own land. In the crowded nations of Europe, only the rich could afford to buy land. But America offered land for the taking to anyone who would go to the frontier and carve out a new settlement. Americans grew up knowing that a new frontier could always be found just beyond the western horizon. Although some people liked town life, others loved the open, free life of the frontier, where every family had plenty of living space. One Illinois farmer, for example, decided to move because people had settled right under his nosealthough the new settlement was twelve miles away. He took his family to Missouri, but then he decided that Missouri was getting too crowded, too. In the end he joined the emigrants and went all the way to Oregon country in search of open, uncrowded land.