The Oregon Trail: Background information when reading The Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail

This article relates to The Oregon Trail

One of the defining qualities of the American character has always been restlessness. But even within the traditions of that locomotive impulse, the so-called "Great Migration of 1843" stands out as a singularly significant upheaval in the history of continental relocation – and a central concern of Rinker Buck's The Oregon Trail: An American Journey.

Prior to the early 1840s, what today is labeled the Oregon Trail was really more of a set of loosely connected overland routes through Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon. After dispatches from the Oregon territory – from Christian missionaries and fur trappers testifying to the abundant wealth of natural resources and the stirring pastoral pulchritude – became more widely publicized, thousands of Easterners caught the fever for westward adventure.

In the late 1830s and early 1840s, a trickle of travelers traversed the nascent trailway, but in 1843, that trickle became a flood, with about 1,000 settlers embarking on a now-fabled wagon train journey that initiated, in the estimation of some historians, one of the greatest mass relocations in American history. The "Great Migration" wagon train was led by Dr. Marcus Whitman, a Methodist minister who was returning to the mission he had established on the Columbia River in the Oregon territory. More than 120 wagons and 5,000 cattle set out from Independence, Missouri in early May for the six-month journey.

Rinker, whose book recounts his attempts with his brother to cross the Oregon Trail by covered wagon, faced some daunting obstacles in his journey, but nothing compared to what the original settlers in 1843 dealt with. Approximately 1 in 10 travelers died along the trail as they dealt with the ravages of starvation, accidents and disease.

Despite the dire consequences faced by those early migrants, interest in westward expansion along the trail spread like wild rye on the prairie. Over the next 25 years, as many as half a million pioneers followed the path of wheel ruts and mule hooves that marked the 2,100-mile trail through the plains, deserts, Rocky Mountains, bluffs and gorges. As reports of the wagon train's arrival made their way east, more and more Americans decided to go west. As Buck notes in The Oregon Trail, "Oregon fever was contagious and soon even families with relatively prosperous farms, and no apparent reason for picking up and leaving, were deciding to sell out and join the adventurous train of white-tops moving west."

Picture of Oregon Trail sites from National Park Service
Picture of Oregon Trail reenactment from National Archives and Records Administration

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Oregon Trail. It originally ran in August 2015 and has been updated for the June 2016 paperback edition. Go to magazine.