Stephen Aron

It absolutely is.

Americans had been heading west for generations before the Oregon Trail migrations commenced in the 1840s.

What was different about the migration on the Oregon Trail from Missouri, jumping off points in Missouri or Iowa, 2,000 miles almost across the plains and mountains to reach the Willamette Valley in Oregon primarily, was the distance and the duration of the journey.

As I said, for generations, Americans, mostly voluntary, but not entirely, because keep in mind that they were often accompanied by African-Americans, enslaved African-Americans, white Americans coming with enslaved African-Americans who were not voluntary migrants on the journey.

But for the most part, the journey westward.

But in the earlier era, prior to the Oregon Trail, most of the migrations had been relatively short error in distance.

And the duration of the trip was a matter of days and weeks, not months and months, not scores of miles, maybe hundreds of miles even, not thousands of miles.

People from New England heading to upstate New York during the American Revolution and its aftermath.

People from Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina heading to adjacent states or adjacent territories, Kentucky and Tennessee in the era of the American Revolution, from Kentucky to Ohio.

Consider, for example...

Abraham Lincoln's family moving from Pennsylvania, the Valley of Virginia, into Kentucky, where Abe Lincoln was born, then migrating into Indiana.

Then Lincoln makes his way to Illinois.

It's that movement to contiguous places that had characterized the earlier American experience.

By contrast, in the 1840s, they suddenly say, let's go to Oregon, all the way across the continent.

Well, there are a lot of factors going on, some the same ones as always.

The hunger for land, demography and opportunity drive westward migration.

Demography, because many of these American families were large families.

Lots of children trying to find land for lots of children in places where land wasn't available meant going west to find cheaper, more available land.

And that sort of drives that migration.

Oregon has this reputation by the 1840s as an unusually fertile and healthful place where good land is available for the taking.