Oregon Trail

7 Key excerpts on "Oregon Trail"

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  eBook - ePub

  Walking Through History

  Constitution & the New Government, Westward Expansion, and Civil War

  • Andi Stix, Frank Hrbek(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Whitman mission, in the early 1830s, was the first realistic attempt at a settlement in the Oregon country. By the beginning of the next decade, there was a steady stream of thousands of Americans trekking the Oregon Trail. What originally had been a tiny trickle of emigrants soon became a flood. There may have been a treaty between England and the United States calling for joint occupancy of Oregon, but most Americans were willing to endure a convenient, momentary amnesia and go for it all. The prevailing attitude among these newcomers was the more emigrants making their homes in the Willamette River Valley, the better the chance of adding a new territory to our young country. These brash Americans were not shy and retiring; if anything, they were tinged with excessive pride.

  The Oregon Trail became the major artery of the Great Migration. Every year from the 1840s on into the 1850s, from late spring to early fall, thousands of families in long wagon trains would begin their journeys across the prairie. They climbed steadily to the high plains, wound through the mountains, and descended down to the coastal lands along the Pacific Ocean. Mormons used the trail to reach their religious haven at the Great Salt Lake. The Forty-Niners and others made a turn to the south at the California cutoff. Many more stuck with it all the way to the Columbia River in Oregon. The Oregon Trail was nineteenth century America’s great highway. It carried a steady, unending stream of traffic east to west and back again, from New York to Chicago, to Des Moines, Lincoln, Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, and on to San Francisco. The pioneers of yesteryear gathered at various cities in Missouri, such as Independence, St. Joseph, or Kansas City. They followed the Platte River west, through South Pass and across the Great Divide. Their journey continued through the Rockies and into the Great Basin. They endured the inferno of the Great Salt Lake Desert, followed the Snake River into the coastal ranges bordering the Pacific, and traveled down the Columbia. When the Great Migration finally ended, coinciding with the building of the first transcontinental railroad, close to half a million Americans had traveled west.

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  American Burial Ground

  A New History of the Overland Trail

  • Sarah Keyes(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  Another pathway was the California Trail, a road that turned southwest away from the one the Kemps took northwest toward Oregon. These multiple migratory pathways across the continent merged into the singular “Overland Trail” because they were linked in people’s minds, then and now, to the same monumental transcontinental migration. While popular mythology typically depicts this migration as a caravan of covered wagons transporting men, women, and children across the sunny Plains, the Trail was a treacherous, often deadly trek that left a string of burials like Riley’s. 3 People of all ages died along the way. Cholera, which dominated the Trail experience during the early 1850s, killed the most emigrants. But overlanders also died of starvation, of dehydration, of dysentery, of other illnesses, and from exposure to the elements. Though a darker portrait of westward migration than we are used to, remembering, and uncovering the cultural significance of the dead—especially in laying claim to land that was inhabited by Indigenous peoples—is the goal of this book. Figure 1. The Overland Trail, 1838–69. This map shows many of the routes emigrants took in the nineteenth century. Map by Erin Greb Cartography There is perhaps no more shameful or significant process of nineteenth-century history than that of the violent incorporation of Native homelands into the U.S. dominion. Historians of Native America and, to a lesser extent, historians of the U.S. West have centered their attention on understanding the brutal, corrupt process through which a self-styled democratic republic wrested control of territory from Indigenous peoples and Mexico to triple its size in little more than five decades. 4 Land is what made the United States possible. Ownership of it opened doors for white men eager for equality while the fruits of it sustained slavery far longer in the United States than in most other republics. U.S

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  The Emigrant Trail

  • Geraldine Bonner(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  The call of the West was a siren song in the ears of these waiting companies. The blood of pioneers urged them forward. Their forefathers had moved from the old countries across the seas, from the elm-shaded towns of New England, from the unkempt villages that advanced into the virgin lands by the Great Lakes, from the peace and plenty of the splendid South. Year by year they had pushed the frontier westward, pricked onward by a ceaseless unrest, "the old land hunger" that never was appeased. The forests rang to the stroke of their ax, the slow, untroubled rivers of the wilderness parted to the plowing wheels of their unwieldy wagons, their voices went before them into places where Nature had kept unbroken her vast and pondering silence. The distant country by the Pacific was still to explore and they yoked their oxen, and with a woman and a child on the seat started out again, responsive to the cry of "Westward, Ho!"

  As many were bound for Oregon as for California. Marcus Whitman and the missionaries had brought alluring stories of that great domain once held so cheaply the country almost lost it. It was said to be of a wonderful fertility and league-long stretches of idle land awaited the settler. The roads ran together more than half the way, parting at Green River, where the Oregon Trail turned to Fort Hall and the California dipped southward and wound, a white and spindling thread, across what men then called "The Great American Desert." Two days' journey from Independence this road branched from the Santa Fé Trail and bent northward across the prairie. A signboard on a stake pointed the way and bore the legend, "Road to Oregon." It was the starting point of one of the historic highways of the world. The Indians called it "The Great Medicine Way of the Pale-face."

  Checked in the act of what they called "jumping off" the emigrants wore away the days in telling stories of the rival countries, and in separating from old companies and joining new ones. It was an important matter, this of traveling partnerships. A trip of two thousand miles on unknown roads beset with dangers was not to be lightly undertaken. Small parties, frightened on the edge of the enterprise, joined themselves to stronger ones. The mountain men and trappers delighted to augment the tremors of the fearful, and round the camp fires listening groups hung on the words of long-haired men clad in dirty buckskins, whose moccasined feet had trod the trails of the fur trader and his red brother.

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  Available until 23 Dec |Learn more

  The Meek Cutoff

  Tracing the Oregon Trail's Lost Wagon Train of 1845

  • Brooks Geer Ragen(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Washington Press

    (Publisher)

  3 from 1840 to 1860, an estimateD fifty thoU-sand people traveled overland across the Ameri-can continent to what became designated as the Oregon Territory. The journey from the Missouri River departure points to Oregon’s Willamette Valley averaged about 166 days—five and a half months—on the trail, during 1841 to 1849. Travel on the Oregon Trail increased during the 1850s and 1860s, but with the completion of the first trans-continental railroad in 1869 activity on the trail declined. Travelers could take the train to Califor-nia and then journey by steamer up the Pacific coast to Oregon. In 1883, the Northern Pacific Railroad reached Portland, Oregon, and travelers could make the entire journey by rail. The vast majority of emigrants moved in response to an extremely successful public rela-tions campaign conducted by politicians, the press, missionaries, and emigrant societies. “Paradise was worth a long and dangerous trip and it was para-dise which the promoters were selling,” historian John Unruh concludes in The Plains Across . Who were the travelers of the Oregon Trail? Unruh sug-gests that many were people inured to strenuous physical exertion, such as farmers, who were more capable of accepting the hardships of overland travel than were prospective settlers from urban locations. Unruh tends to downplay the familiar stereotypical qualifiers of hardships and dangers associated with overland travel. He believes that the hardship theory was spawned and promoted by the press of the 1840s and 1850s and flowered under the aegis of the pioneer associations formed in the 1870s and 1880s when every survivor made his account of the trip seem more arduous than oth-ers. Unruh stresses the cooperative relationship between the emigrants and the Indians and among the emigrants themselves. There were many whose reports and diaries stressed the adventure, hero-ism, and excitement of the trip.

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  eBook - ePub

  Negotiating Critical Literacies in Classrooms

  • Barbara Comber, Anne Simpson(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  They could suggest alternative names for the Oregon Trail itself. For example, the historian of the American West, Frederick Merk (1978) aptly called the Oregon Trail a “path of empire.” Writer Dan Georgakas (1973) named it a “march of death.” Other names might be “invasion of the West,” or “the 20-year trespass.” Just as with Columbus’s “discovery” of America, naming shapes understanding, and we need classroom activities to uncover this process. Students could write and illustrate alternative children’s books describing the Oregon Trail from the standpoint of women, African Americans, Native Americans, or the earth. Now have them play The Oregon Trail again. What do they see this time that they did not see before? Whose worldview is highlighted and whose is hidden? If they choose, they might present their findings to other classes or to teachers who may be considering the use of CD-ROMs. The Oregon Trail is not necessarily more morally obnoxious than other CD-ROMs or curricular materials with similar ideological biases. My aim here is broader than merely to shake a scolding finger at MECC, producer of The Oregon Trail series. I have tried to demonstrate why teachers and students must develop a critical computer literacy. Some of the new CD-ROMs seem more socially aware than the blatantly culturally insensitive materials that still fill school libraries and book-rooms. And the flashy new computer packages also invoke terms long sacred to educators: student empowerment, individual choice, creativity, high interest. It is vital that we remember that coincident with the arrival of these new educational toys is a deepening social and ecological crisis. Global and national inequality between haves and have nots is increasing. Violence of all kinds is endemic. And the earth is being consumed at a ferocious pace. Computer programs are not politically neutral in the moral contests of our time. Inevitably, they take sides

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  The Mormon Trail

  Yesterday and Today

  • William Hill(Author)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • Utah State University Press

    (Publisher)

  The travelers were almost exclusively men, traders and their hired teamsters and, later, professional wagon-masters with their teamsters. The emigrants who later began to use the Santa Fe Trail also did it for economic reasons. Some were emigrants traveling to the Southwest · The Mormon Trail, Yesterday and Today · 2 to settle in the area to make a new life for themselves. Many were gold seekers using the Santa Fe Trail as the first segment of their journey to California. From Santa Fe they might have taken a southern trail along the Gila River, or the Old Spanish Trail, which angled northwest from Santa Fe into Utah before turning southwesterly towards Nevada and California. The western section of the Old Spanish Trail was also later incorporated into a route that led from Salt Lake to California. It afforded California-bound emigrants and gold seekers another way west and also helped to open much of Utah and the Great Basin to settlement. The 1840s brought the development of the Oregon and California Trails. They were originally developed primarily as emigrant trails, but generally followed the route and stopped at sites familiar to those of the earlier trappers and traders. The wagon trail to Oregon was primarily used by emigrants who wanted to settle in the fertile valleys. They had heard stories of the Oregon Territory and the free rich lands of the Wil-lamette River Valley. Many left lands in the Midwest and the East, which had been in the midst of a recession. They left with the intent of traveling as quickly as possible and starting a new life. For the Gentiles, a term used by Mormons for all non-Mormons, the main driving force was to get to the lands of the West Coast. Once they arrived, there was really lit-tle concern for the route they used or its further improvements. It was envisioned as a one-way route. The lands between their jumping-off and destination sites were seen as an obstacle to pass through with little concern for the area itself.

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  Contested Boundaries

  A New Pacific Northwest History

  • David J. Jepsen, David J. Norberg(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  2

  Americans look West

  Americans developed an interest in the Pacific Northwest as reports from explorers and traders drifted east. As early as 1813, the Missouri Gazette called for American expansion, claiming emigrants would not have to worry about anything a “person would dare call a mountain” and, most likely, “would not meet with an Indian to interrupt their progress.”3 Those far-fetched claims did not inspire land-hungry Americans to venture into land dominated by Britain.

  Interest jumped after Britain and the United States established the Convention of 1818, which gave citizens of both nations the right to settle in the Pacific Northwest, spurring Congressional action. Virginia representative John Floyd urged the federal government to build a string of forts to “Oregon Country,” grant land to settlers, and secure American claims. His bold plan raised the specter of war with Britain, and Congress quickly rejected it.4

  Debating terminology

  Contemporary historians contest the very words we use to describe the people who moved west on the Oregon Trail. Americans have often referred to them as “pioneers” or “settlers,” but both words are problematic. “Pioneers” suggests they were the first people to enter the region, while “settlers” indicates that no one established settlements or otherwise developed the region before they arrived. Native Peoples, of course, lived in the Pacific Northwest for many thousands of years before the Oregon Trail period in well-established communities. From their point of view, the arrival of Americans began a process of invasion and conquest, not an era of settlement. While terms like “invaders” and “conquerors” may not be the norm in American culture, they more accurately describe the reality of the Northwest's past.5

  Calls for action grew in the 1830s, led in part by Boston schoolteacher Hall Kelley. Inspired by the journals of Lewis and Clark, Kelley zealously promoted Oregon. In his mind, the “position of that country,” its “physical appearance,” and “qualities of soil and climate” made the benefits of colonization obvious. He felt a mere “three thousand of the active sons of American freedom” could win Oregon from Britain. Increased trade with Native Peoples and Asia would fuel economic growth, while those “cast out of employment, into idleness and poverty” could go to Oregon and “pursue usely occupations.” Surely, he argued, “the most enlightened nation on earth” could not forego this “best means of national prosperity.”6

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