We tend to think of the pioneers on the Oregon Trail as farmers, but the first were actually Christian missionaries intent on converting the Native Americans. Marcus and Narcissa Whitman were from New York. In 1836 the Whitmans went west with another missionary couple, Henry Harmon Spalding and his wife Eliza, and with a single missionary named William H. Gray. The group traveled with fur traders for most of the journey, and took wagons across the Rocky Mountains.

Life on the frontier was very hard and lonely, and the native Americans were not interested in converting to a new religion. Marcus Whitman then acted as a guide to more than 1,000 people who wanted to move west. Their Whitman mission became an important stopping point for new settlers. So it was the Whitmans who founded the Oregon Trail and begun the Great Migration west, but in doing so they caused the destruction of the Native American peoples on the way.

The Oregon Trail was not the only way to get to Oregon of course. People had been going by ship around the tip of South America for a long time. But that was simply too expensive for most people. The cheapness was what made the Oregon Trail so attractive.

At that time, only the South Pass through the Rocky Mountains was known, so whether people were going to Washington, Oregon or California, they all went on the Oregon Trail to begin with. The Oregon Trail was much more than a pathway to the state of Oregon; it was the only practical corridor to the entire western United States.

Although it was practicable, it was not for the ill-prepared or weak. Around one in 10 people died along the way. Because the wagons had no springs, sitting on them was uncomfortable, so many people walked the entire two-thousand miles. Those who could not afford wagons, pushed handcarts. Despite what is shown in movies, most native American tribes were actually helpful to the emigrants, and traded with them. The real enemies of the pioneers were cholera, poor sanitation and accidents. The 1843 wagon train led by Marcus Whitman started off a massive move west along the Oregon Trail. Over the next 25 years more than a half million people went west on the Trail. Some went all the way to Oregon’s Willamette Valley in search of farmland, while many more split off for California. The years of the wagon trains along the Oregon Trail finally ended in 1869, when the transcontinental railroad was completed – providing a faster and much safer route west.

But in those three decades so many heavy wagons passed along the route that actual wagon ruts from the Oregon Trail can still be seen today in places like Guernsey, Wyoming.

The route

What you first need to remember is that is was not simply a train of wagons. It was also a massive herd of animals to set up farms on arrival. Animals need to eat most of the day, so progress was determined by animal grazing, limiting how far people traveled to just 5 miles or so a day. The route began outside St. Louis. Here, settlers from farther east would buy and equip wagons and gather in large groups, waiting to set off. Some would bring wagons from the east on boats. People who could not afford a wagon of their own would offer their services as wagon drivers or helpers in exchange for passage and space for their goods. Others (especially the Mormons) would have a simple handcart to carry everything they owned in the world.

The Missouri River Valley is the natural route west from St. Louis; so most emigrants first loaded their wagons onto steamships and headed as far upstream as they could afford. Two-hundred miles from St. Louis, the Missouri river turns to the north, but they wanted to go west, so the pioneers unloaded their wagons at one of several small towns along the Missouri river which they called “jumping off places” . By mid-April, the prairie outside each jumping off town was packed with pioneers. But they were going nowhere. Once the winter snows have melted, it takes some weeks for the prairie grasses to grow again, and until there was sufficient food for the animals, the pioneers dare not move. The wagons could not carry feed for all the livestock they were bringing. People were really on their own. A family of four would need over a thousand pounds of food to sustain them on the 2000 mile journey to Oregon. Meat, milk and eggs would be provided by their own animals.

In 1844, the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party crossed the Missouri River at Council Bluffs, as they sought a new route into California across the Sierra Nevada Mountains. By 1848, the town had become known as Kanesville, after Mormon, Thomas L. Kane. Kanesville became the main supply and outfitting point for the Mormons, and it is the head end of the Mormon Trail. Settlers departing west from Kanesville went into the sparsely settled, unorganized parts of the Territory of Missouri to the Oregon Country and the newly conquered California Territory. By the 1860s, nearly all migration wagon trains were passing near the renamed town of Council Bluffs.

From Fort Caspar, those on the Oregon Trail went to look for the granite dome of Independence Rock. Many emigrants scratched their names on this rock (see below). It was so named because emigrants attempted to reach the rock by July 4 (Independence Day in the United States), in order to reach their destinations before the first mountain snowfalls.

And so the plains were left, and the journey up South Pass began. From South Pass the trail continued southwest to the Green River, a tributary of the Colorado. Three to five ferries were in use on the Green during peak travel periods. After crossing the Green, the main trail continued southwest to Fort Bridger.

Fort Bridger was originally a 19th-century fur trading outpost established in 1842, on Blacks Fork of the Green River, Wyoming. It became a vital resupply point for wagon trains on the Oregon Trail, California Trail, and Mormon Trail.

From Fort Bridger the Mormon Trail veered off southwest through the Wasatch Mountains. From Fort Bridger, the main trail went northwest to the Bear River Valley, and then to the Thomas Fork Valley at the present Wyoming–Idaho border.

The End of the Oregon Trail

Once in Oregon, the settlers would split into smaller groups, going their own way. Some settlers had already bought or claimed land to homestead, others simply looked for an unclaimed spot and settled on it.

Although getting to Oregon had been tough, that was just the beginning. Settlers had to move very quickly to prepare for winter‚ building a house and chopping enough firewood to last until spring. Settlers Usually arrived near the end of the growing season, so that first winter they would need to live off any supplies and animals they brought with them or could afford to buy. Then, in spring, those who made it through the first winter could begin preparing the land to plant, and the real work of farming began.

Our book 'The Journey West' tells you much more.