Stephen Aron

By contrast, the vision of Thomas Jefferson really triumphs in the 19th century.

And it is that vision that says, no, we want to make land more available.

We want to diminish the price at which the federal government will sell it, diminish the minimum acreage required.

allow people to pay it off in credit installments, ultimately allow what's called preemption rights, meaning people who had squatted on land would be able to take control and ownership of that land based on their occupancy and improvement, as opposed to having gained legal title in advance to their going.

So all of those factors are in play.

As I said, in many respects, they were the same as their parents and their grandparents.

And their dream that impelled them west was very similar to what impelled their parents and grandparents to go west.

Again, the desire for good, cheap land and the possibilities that came with that.

In general, though, again, emphasizing what makes this Oregon migration different is the distance and duration is so much greater.

And that makes it a little harder for people to just simply uproot and go, that the cost of going is much more considerable to go from Missouri to Oregon than it is to go from Ohio to Indiana, for example, as a move.

And so already there's

It takes certain kinds of you have a certain kind of status to be able to go or be able to borrow the money to go.

So that puts a certain limitation or to be able to go in some other way.

So but it's in general, the Oregon migration, like earlier migrations, is characterized by the migration of farm of families moving west.

As I say, often with multiple children, often with children being born along the way on the trail.

But these were immigrant families in a lot of cases, weren't they?

Sometimes.

Sometimes.

And that's a little later to the Great Plains where you see even more immigrant families heading to the Great Plains as opposed to the Oregon migration, which is...

primarily native-born Americans, people who had been born within the United States, often in places like Iowa and Missouri or other parts of what we now think of as the Midwest, heading to the Pacific slope.