These wiki pages can point you to significant pioneer record collections though not all of them are freely available :. FamilySearch Blog. About FamilySearch. For Latter-day Saints. For the Whole Family. Genealogy Research. Heritage and History. News and Events. Personal History. Westward Expansion. The trail followed the Missouri and Platte Rivers west through present-day Nebraska to South Pass on the Continental Divide in Wyoming, then west along the Snake River to Fort Hall in eastern Idaho, where travelers typically chose to continue due west to Oregon or to head southwest to Utah and California.
Families and individuals on the trail typically traveled in companies that had twenty-five or more wagons, with one or more individuals providing general leadership. When smaller groups combined, leaders shared duties and the authority for keeping order.
Travelers generally walked alongside wagons full of their belongings and foodstuffs. Most used farm wagons that had been modified for long-distance travel, including strengthened axle trees and wagon tongues and wooden bows that arched over the wagon box to support canvas or other heavy cloth covering.
The wagons were ten to twelve feet long, four feet wide, and two to three feet deep, with fifty-inch diameter rear wheels and forty-four-inch front wheels made of oak with iron tire rims. The wagons weighed from 1, to 1, pounds and carried loads between 1, and 2, pounds. They had sturdy hardwood box frames that were made as watertight as possible to facilitate stream and river crossings.
Most overlanders used two or four yoked oxen to pull their wagons, because they had more endurance and were less expensive than horses or mules and they were less likely to be stolen by Indians.
Prudent travelers carried spare parts, grease for axle bearings, heavy rope, chains, and pulleys to keep wagons repaired and to aid in rescue from predicaments.
From the earliest decades of the Republic, groups of migrants headed west from the established states to stake out homesteads on the western periphery of institutional society. By the s, some politicians called for resettlement in the Oregon Country, a relatively un-resettled region over which the United States and Great Britain jointly claimed sovereignty by treaty in The penetration of the fur trade into the region during the s and s, especially on the Upper Missouri and the Columbia river basins, exposed both the natural wealth of the region and the presence of Native populations.
During most of this westward movement, overland trails and river passages were essential conduits of people, trade, and institutional expansion. Long-distance wagon travel had long moved Americans west and south on such trails as the Great Wagon Road in the s, the Wilderness Road in the s, the Natchez Trace in the s, and the Santa Fe Trail in the s.
Louis in , and missionaries trekked over western sections of the future Oregon Trail several years later on their way to the Columbia and Willamette Valleys. In the late s, the Oregon Provisional Emigration Society, a Methodist group based in Massachusetts, promoted missionary expeditions to Oregon. By the early s, the willing and determined, captured by the idea of Oregon, decided to ignore the naysayers and embrace the adventure.
By the mids, emigrants could use trail guides to plan their journey and avoid common mistakes. Travel west on the Oregon Trail began at several towns on the Missouri River, from Independence to Council Bluffs, and then followed routes west on both sides of the Platte River.
Companies of wagons formed, emigrants purchased supplies, and the group followed the developing ruts west. Lionet and Fr. Barnes and wife, L. Most groups tried to set out by mid-April. Wagon trains could average from twelve to fifteen miles per travel day, but most had to pause because of conditions and some did not travel on Sundays. In many sections, the trail spread across miles of terrain, as successive emigrants sought easier transit. Sources of water and forage for animals often determined camping locations.
Stream and river crossings, steep descents and ascents, violent storms, and the persistent threat of disease among large groups of travelers were the most common challenges.
Disease was the greatest threat on the trail, especially cholera, which struck wagon trains in years of heavy travel. Most deaths from disease occurred east of Fort Laramie. Accidents were the second most frequent cause of death on the trail. Indians killed about emigrants before , but emigrants killed more Indians, and no Indians or emigrants died from violence until Wagon trains organized their members through consensual agreement to rules of order, behavior, property security, and work responsibilities written into constitutions that also identified officers and their specific duties.
Constitutions and bylaws prevailed until , after which most groups preferred to operate using ad hoc agreements. Many wagon trains organized tribunals to mete out punishments for property crimes, assaults, and activities that jeopardized security. The most common punishments were assignment of extra guard duty and expulsion. Whippings were rare, and executions took place only after a legal proceeding and a jury verdict.
African Americans traveled the Oregon Trail, making up perhaps as many as three percent of overlanders before Some traveled as the slave property of white travelers, but many were free people. For many free Blacks, emigration west offered hope for a better life with fewer social obstacles, and in many cases that proved to be true.
The trail experience for men and women differed considerably. Their roles and duties followed nineteenth-century norms, with women responsible for children, cooking, laundry, and personal gear. Women walked, as did men, but they did not stand guard and were not expected to work ox teams or repair wagons.
Men held most, if not all, leadership positions. By the time overlanders reached the Oregon Country in present-day southeastern Idaho , they had traveled nearly two-thirds of their journey, but the most difficult sections lay ahead.
Overlanders continued northwest, crossing the Malheur River and leaving the Snake at a place known as Farewell Bend before climbing up the Burnt and Powder river drainages to Ladd Canyon.
Just east of present-day Pendleton, a branch of the trail headed north to Waiilatpu, a mission established by Marcus and Narcissa Whitman in , and then west on the Walla Walla River to Fort Walla Walla, a post first established by the North West Fur Company in Oregon Trail summary: The 2,mile east-west trail served as a critical transportation route for emigrants traveling from Missouri to Oregon and other points west during the mids.
Travelers were inspired by dreams of gold and rich farmlands, but they were also motivated by difficult economic times in the east and diseases like yellow fever and malaria that were decimating the Midwest around From about the Oregon Trail was laid down by traders and fur trappers.
It could only be traveled by horseback or on foot. By the year , the first of the migrant train of wagons was put together. Work was done to clear more and more of the trail stretching farther West and it eventually reached Willamette Valley, Oregon.
There were several starting points in Nebraska Territory, Iowa and Missouri. The many offshoots of the trail and the main trail itself were used by an estimated , settlers from the s through When the first railroad was completed, allowing faster and more convenient travel, use of the trail quickly declined. 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.
One in 17 never made it. This road to the Far West soon became known by another name—the Oregon Trail. Even today, ruts from the wagon wheels remain etched indelibly in the fragile topsoil of the Western landscape.
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.
In , the trickle of emigrants into Independence, Missouri, began to swell. They came from all directions, by steamboat and over primitive roads that a day or two of heavy rain turned into quagmires.
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 did know that the backcountry of Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas had not proved to be a shining paradise. The doldrums that followed the depression of shriveled the value of land and the price of crops, and malaria ravaged the bottomlands that once had promised so much. Ignorance allowed travelers to advance where fuller knowledge might have rooted them with apprehension. But they were farm folk and had pioneered before.
They were adept with wagons, livestock, rifles and axes. The women were used to walking beside the men as wilderness equals. Above all, they were restless—once a farm had been tamed, the narrow horizons of the backwoods communities closed around them. Vast and unclaimed riches far to the west, across the Great Plains, beckoned. It was as if the land itself were pulling the people westward.
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 Meek and Newell managed to get the first wheeled vehicles over the Blue Mountains. 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.
At Soda Springs in what is now southwest Idaho one contingent split off for Oregon. In , Dr. Elijah White, the newly appointed Indian agent in Oregon, successfully led men, women and children there. 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.
Peter Burnett was chosen captain, and a so-called cow column for slower wagons and herds of livestock was formed with Jesse Applegate as its leader. Applegate would later provide descriptions of life on the Oregon Trail in his memoir, A Day with the Cow Column in Mountain man John Gant was to be chief guide as far as Fort Hall.
They would follow the trail left by Meek and Newell. Marcus Whitman, a Protestant missionary and physician who had established a mission in Oregon in , would join the Applegate train on his return west after an eastern visit. Doctors came to be a welcome rarity along the trail. Along with his uncle, Jess traveled with his parents, four brothers, one sister and numerous other relatives. Years later, when he was in his 70s, he wrote Recollections of My Boyhood , in which he largely succeeds in portraying events and personalities from the western crossing through the eyes of a young boy.
As the Applegate party journeyed across the prairies and over the Rockies, the trek had mostly seemed like grand fun to the boy. At first his recollections bubble with the thrill of adventure. He had traded nails and bits of metal with Indian children and thrown buffalo chips at other white children. Later, though, the recollections become more somber. Jesse A. Applegate had also experienced the suffering that almost no early traveler on the Oregon Trail could avoid. Food supplies would inevitably become low and water scarce.
A bone-wrenching weariness would set in as the miseries mounted. The U. But as the emigrants pushed overland, many lost sight of the vision that had set them going. The weight of hardship piled on hardship was enough, on occasion, to make men and women break down and cry, and perhaps even turn back. Yet most travelers summoned up reserves of courage and kept going.
They endured every hardship from a mule kick in the shins to cholera. The ones who got through usually did so because of sheer determination. The Applegate train began to assemble in late April, the best time to get rolling. The date of departure had to be selected with care. If they began the more than 2,mile journey too early in the spring, there would not be enough grass on the prairie to keep the livestock strong enough to travel.
Sometimes there was a dessert of dried fruit. The pioneers traveled in groups called trains, but often individual families would strike out on their own.
They could travel about 16 miles per day. There were rare attacks by Indians. Up until , fewer than 50 emigrant deaths were blamed on Indian attacks.
But as the numbers of travelers increased, so did the attacks. By emigrant deaths probably totaled close to However, the emigrants killed even more Indians. Illness and accidents were more serious threats than Indian attacks.
About 20, people died on the California Trail between and — an average of ten graves for every mile. Disease was the number one killer.
0コメント