Stephen Aron

And that certainly is a great driver of immigration from across the Atlantic into the United States and ultimately pushing people to the western parts of the United States as well.

There are many trails that go west, and sometimes they're grouped under the heading of the Oregon Trail.

Sometimes they're called overland trails.

There are a variety of them.

The particular route to Oregon in particular...

generally follows from those Midwest jumping off points along the Mississippi or bend of the Missouri River, westward along the Platte River, and then across the Great South Pass through the Rocky Mountains, then the Snake River Valley, and then ultimately into the Willamette Valley.

There was California trails that diverted from that, especially after the discovery of gold in California.

It shifts the migration, the mass migration from Oregon to California and a very different group of people head to California than head to Oregon.

Though in the 1840s, it was sometimes said that at the point in the trail, this was a joke that Mark Twain, I believe, made at the point in the trail where the Oregon and California trails diverge.

The people who could read went to Oregon and the people who couldn't went to California.

Of course.

Because the California Trail involved a much more harsh crossing across some of the most arid lands of North America.

And so finding water in those places was a particularly testing, even more so than in the parts of the trail to Oregon.

Yeah, four to six months is the average crossing.

Again, to get to California, especially during the gold rush, it's a little quicker because most of the people are not coming in wagon trains.

They're often coming just with horses and pack mules and they're moving more quickly.

But the migration to Oregon is generally four to six months, and you had a lot of choices to make before you headed west.

What were you going to bring?

When were you going to go?

The experience in the 1840s is a little bit different from the 1850s.