Oregon Trail Essay Research Paper The Oregon

Oregon Trail Essay, Research Paper

The Oregon Trail

The Interstate 90, 80, 40 and other even number on today.s highways provide travelers as to which direction they are driving inasmuch as the Interstate 5 ~ 95 indicate that highways are running north to south of the North America. It wasn.t so easy for those emigrants who packed up every thing they owned and headed towards the west in 19th Century in the United States. It wasn.t so easy for those who decided to start new opportunities and prosperity of the new land will provide in the west. Their choice was to journey through very unforgiving but beautiful, deadly but challenging on the Oregon Trail. It crossed about 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of rugged terrain, including desert and Indian Territory of the Northwest. It was the greatest emigrant routes in the history of US.

However the emigrants of the 1840s were not the first to travel the Oregon Trail (Coons). In 1540 the Spanish explorer Coronado ventured as far north as present-day Kansas, but the inland routes across the plains remained the sole domain of Native Americans until 1804, when Lewis and Clark skirted the edges on their epic journey of discovery to the Pacific Northwest. Zeb Pike explored the “Great American Desert,” as the Great Plains was then known. The historians agreed that Lewis and Clark Expedition had a direct influence on the economy of the West even before the explorers had returned to St. Louis (Hains). The US history was replete with explorers, mountain men, and soldiers, and scientists who opened up the West in early 1800.s. John Jacob Astor, at the insistence of his friend Thomas Jefferson, founded the Pacific Fur Company in New York. The Americans became involved in the fur trade in 1810. Astor sent Wilson Price Hunt west in 1811. Hunt followed the Lewis and Clark route as far as the Dakotas and then went overland across Union Pass, near Jackson Hole (Stone). The route they took was proved unsuitable, and it was after much hardship that the Hunt party arrived in Astoria (later known then as Fort Astor) finally in the spring of 1812.

Initially, fur traders and missionaries used the trail, and suddenly in the 1840s the trail widespread with the wagon trains of about 12,000 emigrants to Oregon. Including an occasional stop at various forts for replenishment of supplies and livestock and for repairs, the journey took about four to six months. During the journey, cholera was a persistent problem. Some 1,000 settlers joined the “great migration” led by Marcus Whitman 1843). Abundance of gold seekers also used the eastern portion of the trail to California in the late 1840s. The thousands of Mormons followed a route later called the Mormon Trail in 1847, which frequently coincided in Wyoming with the Oregon Trail. Of the entire overland routes west, the Oregon Trail was in use for the longest period; after railroads replaced much travel by wagon train, the trail was often used for eastward cattle and sheep drives.

The .Golden Army. of 1849 seekers included: .rich men, poor men, beggar men, thieves, farmers, lawyers, doctors, merchants, preachers, workmen, Republicans, Whigs, Federalist, Abolitionist, Baptists, transcendentalist, Campbellites, Millerites, Presbyterians, Morons, white men, black men, yellow men, Germans, Russians, Poles, Chileans, Swiss, Spaniards, sailors, steamboat men, lumbermen, gamblers, the loose, squint-eyed, pockmarked, one-armed, the bearded, the beardless, the mustachioed, side-whiskered, and goateed, signing, cursing, weeping, and laughing in their sleep (Hulbert).

The Oregon-bound emigrants were generally poor families who had to sell everything they owned (or at least what the bank had not yet repossessed) and booked passage out of town on the same steamboats that were bringing in supplies for their local general stores (Dryden). While outfitting for the journey, earlier pioneers needed to purchase everything necessary to sustain them along the Trail for up to six months, as well as farming and building supplies for when they arrived in Oregon . they had to pretty much prepare for the journey as well as their rest of their life. The Midwest states were making lot of money outfitting the western travelers thus it was big business for merchants along the banks of the Missouri River from St. Louis to Omaha. After the decision to go west was finally made, after all the preparation were completed, and just on the eve of starting off on the plains, gnawing doubts about the undertaking assailed many an emigrant.s mind (Doetch).

Later Oregon emigrants had easier decisions to make. As time went on, the Trail and its environs were thoroughly documented and explored, and the route was improved by the passage of thousands of wagons beating the land flat, entrepreneurs operating ferries at the major river crossings, and the discovery of alternate routes that shaved days off the trip. As the road was more developed and the trip took less time, emigrants could carry heavier loads in their wagons. The need to bring seeds and tools for use on arrival in Oregon vanished, as stores in Oregon City were now supplied with goods brought around Cape Horn by ship. However, they still needed food, gear, medical supplies, and clothing for at least four months on the road.

The first item needed was, of course, a wagon and team. Some brought their old farm wagons from home, while others purchased