Stephen Aron

By the 1850s, guides and guidebooks are a little bit more well-established, so people kind of know what they're doing more than they do in the 1840s, where there's a little bit more...

uncertainties or more uncertainties around what the route would be.

What they often called pioneer parlance was called going to see the elephant.

That's how they referred to go seeing these Western lands and these fabulous and fantastic geographies, which to them were in some ways almost as foreign as the surface of the moon is to 20th and 21st century people.

Because for one thing,

The real question would be, if you're sitting in Missouri or Iowa, for example, why did you just head to Kansas or Nebraska or the Dakotas?

Those are the adjacent territories.

And the prior generations would have headed to those lands.

But those lands, especially as one heads further west onto the plains, had become, again, in American understanding, going back to Stephen Long, the explorer in the 1820s,

were all sort of lumped together as part of a great American desert.

Because for many Americans who grew up in wooded, humid environments of the eastern United States, the treeless,

grasslands of the plains, the windswept grasslands of the Great Plains, or to them, a desert.

Trained to assess the fertility of land based on the number and types of trees it supported, the grasslands appeared inhospitable to agriculture and therefore needed to be jumped over to get to the greater agricultural potential that lay on the Pacific Slope.

And it's certainly, for those who left too early, sometimes you run into the challenge of the grasses haven't sprouted on the Great Plains.

If you're bringing your cattle, if you're bringing your livestock with you, what are they going to be fed on?

They need forage and they don't have it.

If you leave too late,

You run the risk of getting caught in one of the mountain snowstorms in the early fall.

The most famous example in 1846, not to Oregon, but to California, being the Donner Party.

which becomes a cautionary tale for later migrants about the dangers, about tarrying too long, not making good time on the trail.