Stephen Aron

pouring rain and the deluge that they sometimes suffered, endured, but also the blazing heat of summer days on the plains or even in the deserts, the true deserts, made certainly these were not easy experiences.

Well, there are a number of incidents, even in the 1840s, a couple of significant massacres or combats that get a great deal of attention.

So certainly already in the 1840s, even though

in quantitative terms, death at the hands of Native Americans or even killing Native Americans, even though we don't get the numbers or something that's hard to really gauge, but the numbers are relatively small during the 1840s.

Maybe 300 Native Americans get killed in accounts that we have and similar numbers of pioneers killed by Indians during those earlier years on the crossings.

But there are a number of famous incidents that happen and these get a great deal of attention and help to sort of create an image of

danger and hostility, outsized at the time.

During the 1850s, it becomes more prevalent, those sort of dangerous encounters and those hostile encounters.

Still, though, much, much less numerous than we've been led to believe by Hollywood movies and even by dime novels of the 19th century, which tended to accent them.

or Wild West Show reenactments of the earlier era.

I think the numbers I've seen are a little less than that.

But again, keep in mind that this was an era in which when you add in infant mortality, and a lot of people are giving birth on the trail, and a lot of babies are not necessarily surviving that experience, and sometimes mothers die in childbirth.

So this is an era, of course, when

Death stalks lots of people, but certainly the experience of the trail makes it even more challenging and even more deadly.

And there's a recent book by Sarah Kyes that actually tries to chronicle not just how many people die on the trail or what they die of, but its impact on American culture and on the memories of trail goers, just the ubiquity.

of seeing or knowing someone who died along the way and what kind of markers they would leave for those who they left behind, you know, to shallow graves, trying to keep them from wolves who died along the journey from disease or drowning or accidental discharge of firearms.

We shouldn't leave that out as a cause of death to people shooting themselves sometimes or shooting one another by mistake, at least allegedly.

Well, as I say, the hope is that you find good land and you can sit on it, occupy it, gain title to it.

And that's the dream.

Keep in mind that Oregon in the early years of this migration remains contested territory.