Stories

African Americans were among the pioneers who crossed the trail to Oregon, some coming willingly as free men and women but others forced to travel as the property of slaveholders. Those who reached Oregon between the 1840s and 1860s probably numbered in the hundreds.

The Oregon and California trails traverse lands where women challenged traditional gender roles. In the early 1840s Americans began heading west in large numbers, many traveling in family groups. Women in the nation’s more settled areas were supposed to excel at domestic work, like cooking, cleaning, and raising children; however, as part of a wagon train, women got to showcase a wider range of skills.

Everyone who’s ever played the Oregon Trail game know that emigrants stood a good chance of dying from disease or drowning at a river crossing before ever reaching the Willamette Valley. Of course, there were other common ways to die on the way to Oregon, Utah, or California. These were the possibilities people knew and worried about as they loaded up their wagons and started their oxen westward. But there were other ways to end one’s trip early. Unexpected ways. Freak accidents.

In the early years of the California gold rush, cholera struck each spring at the thronging jumping-off towns along the Missouri River where thousands of gold seekers and Oregon-bound emigrants gathered to outfit. The deadly disease claimed many lives before the victims even had a chance to start across the prairies of Kansas or Nebraska. It claimed many more along the trail corridor to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and in American Indian encampments and villages, as well.

Once-friendly Western tribes watched with mounting anger as emigrants helped themselves, often wastefully, to their game, grass, water, and wood. Indian agents warned of bloody conflicts ahead if the issues between native peoples and emigrants were not soon resolved. In response, the U.S. government called for a treaty conference to be held near Fort Laramie, Wyoming, in September 1851. Some 12,000 members of 11 different Northern Plains tribes answered the call.

As American settlers surged westward across the eastern woodlands and prairies in the early 19th century, they pushed American Indians out of their ancestral homes. The U.S. government resettled many of those displaced Eastern tribes —the Kickapoo, Delaware, Potawatomi, and others— in congressionally designated Indian Territory west of the Missouri River and south of the Platte. The resettled Eastern tribes were among the first Indians encountered by emigrants through Kansas.

Over the years, thousands of wagon wheels and hooves churned the earth as they traveled west. Their traces are often referred to as wagon ruts and they can appear a variety of ways depending on the type of soil and the continued effects of water erosion. One of the best ways to experience the Oregon Trail is by taking a step back in time while visiting a trail rut. Luckily, there are still places where you can have that experience today. Take a look and plan your visit today!

Almost every movement in American history has a corresponding counter movement. The Mexican American War (1846-48), which resulted in Mexico ceding much of the modern-day American Southwest to the United States, is a good example. With the stroke of a pen, parts of the Santa Fe, California, Oregon, Pony Express, Mormon Pioneer, and Old Spanish trails, as well as El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, suddenly became American territory.

The Oregon National Historic Trail commemorates the arduous overland journey—across rivers, through forests, and over mountains—made by thousands of emigrants in the middle of the nineteenth century. While we know a lot about the trip itself, we know considerably less about what greeted emigrants upon arrival. Where did they live? How did they earn money? What did they do for fun? Perhaps most importantly, did their new home meet their expectations?

Most who followed the Oregon Trail did not traverse the Columbia River Gorge, if they could help it, because the gorge posed numerous dangers for travelers unfamiliar with the rugged terrain and raging river. When Samuel Barlow opened a road around the southern side of Mount Hood in 1846, overlanders going to Oregon City more often chose that route, rather than braving the Columbia River.

The Rocky Mountains stretch like a jagged spine between Alaska and Mexico, splitting North America into East and West. The Continental Divide is not a simple line of peaks, easily threaded by tracks and roads, but a complex of overlapping mountain ranges and treeless sagebrush steppe, hundreds of miles wide. In the days of covered wagon travel, the Rockies were an imposing barrier to the movement of people, commerce, and communications. South Pass was the gateway to the West.

Otoe Indians called this region “Nebrathka,” meaning “flat water,” and the French word “Platte” means the same. The defining flatness of the broad Platte River Valley, which averages five to seven miles wide, made it ideal for animal-powered travel on both sides of the stream. The long Platte River also provided plenty of water and native grasses for game and livestock. Many emigrants later recalled it as the easiest, most pleasant part of their westering journey.

Emigrants heading west along the Platte River in the early years of the overland emigration wrote excitedly in diaries and journals about their first sightings of buffalo and the wild hunts that typically followed. Some wagon trains got caught in buffalo stampedes, and some lost cattle that ran off to join the unimaginably enormous herds of wild bison. But as commercial hunters and sport-slaughter thinned those herds that part of the overland experience changed.

For many travelers on the overland trails, the Fourth of July was just another day of trekking through sand and sagebrush. For some it was a day of melancholy, thinking of how their loved ones at home might be celebrating. For others, especially the Fortyniners, it was fun a day of celebration, usually involving the firing of “salutes” with their handguns and rifles, energetic flag-waving, and a feast.

Valentines day cards rose to popularity in the United States in the mid-1800s. Victorian cards were elaborate, decorative, often-lace trimmed, and mass-produced. Not everyone could afford such cards, so handmade cards were very popular with pioneers and others who couldn't buy an expensive card. You can take your Valentine back in time by making a historic card! Use the provided template, or make a handmade card, and return to the 1800s with your love.

Most emigrants reached the end of their long overland journey weeks or months before December 25 rolled around. A few, though, stranded or lost along the way, spent their first Christmas in the West in winter camps many miles from the settlements. Here’s how they observed the holiday.

Nineteenth-century overland migration is one of the best documented processes in American history. Journals, letters, sketches, and guidebooks paint vivid pictures of the varied landscapes and emotions that migrants experienced on their way west. Yet despite this rich body of evidence, there is no official count of how many people undertook the journey. Some of the best data we have comes courtesy of officers at Fort Laramie, who counted passing travelers in the year of 1850.

Vancouver’s Old Apple Tree, nearly 200 years old and historically associated with Hudson Bay Company’s Fort Vancouver, died in late June 2020 from natural causes. It was the oldest apple tree in the State of Washington—maybe the oldest in the Pacific Northwest—maybe the oldest on the West Coast.

Crossing the Southern Plains in 1806, Zebulon Pike described herds of bison that “exceeded imagination.” Yet by the 1850s, many of the Native nations that relied on bison for sustenance—such as the Kiowas, Comanches, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes—were seeing fewer bison than ever before. What happened?