Chapter 1: What motivated families to embark on the Oregon Trail?
The sun is lifting over the prairie as the wagons begin to move. Canvas tops catch the early light. Dew clings to the grasses. Oxen snort, leaning into their yokes. Leather creaking. Wood groaning under the weight of wagon, passengers, and possessions. The entirety of what each family owns. Most adults walk at this point of the day. Riding wastes the animals.
A woman grips her shawl against the morning chill, her dress already dust-stained. A man tightens a loose bolt on a wheel, another checks the oxen's gimpy hoof. Gradually, the wagons jockey onto the trail in a long, uneven line, stretching forward to the horizon, towards nothing but grass and sky. Behind them, exactly the same. By mid-morning, the sun burns hot.
With every step and turn of the wheels, dust rises into a cloud, settling into mouths and eyes. Children complain. Mothers softly hush them. Near noon, they pause by a creek for water to be collected, brown though it is. Hard bread is broken and passed along. No one lingers, noting the clouds gathered in the distant sky and the low, ominous thunder.
Chapter 2: How did the Oregon Trail migrations differ from earlier migrations?
Someone mutters a perfunctory prayer. Finally, by evening, they've circled the wagons and built small fires. Shirts washed, hung to dry, beans spooned onto pewter plates. The names of those who have died are spoken of quietly, or more often, not at all. Because tomorrow, they must all rise once more to meet the dawn and do it all again.
Glad to welcome you to another episode of American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman, your host, and today we head out to the great American frontier. First in a series of episodes on the subject, traveling west over the endless plains, teeming rivers, towering mountain passes. Today's episode tracks that most legendary of pioneering wagon routes, 2,000 miles from Missouri to the Pacific Northwest.
Over the years, it carried hundreds of thousands of people to new lives in what is still one of the largest volunteer migrations in human history. We're talking about today the Oregon Trail, why it happened, how it happened, and what a profound difference it made in a nation newly determined to manifest its destiny from sea to shining sea.
We're accompanied on this journey by Stephen Aaron, the Calvin and Marilyn Gross Director, President and CEO of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. Great place. Stephen is Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA. His works include The American West, A Very Short Introduction, and Peace and Friendship, An Alternative History of the American West. Greetings, Professor.
Hello, Stephen. Thanks for joining us. Cue the banjo. We're out on the trail.
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Chapter 3: What were the main challenges faced by travelers on the Oregon Trail?
It's a pleasure to be here. Let's head west. It is such a storied era of American history, the pioneer days, so many books written, the John Ford movies, even eventually a very famous video game we covered on another episode on this series. But putting the whole dramatized version aside, it is still such a foundational element of American expansion and American culture, isn't it?
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.
What was going on at that particular time, 1830 to 1840, that sort of laid the groundwork for this decision for so many to go?
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. And that becomes the primary destination. But in addition, you see the migrations in the 1830s to Texas, for example, people from the South heading into Texas where cotton lands open up there.
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Chapter 4: What was daily life like for pioneers on the Oregon Trail?
And in those unstable times of the 1830s, in those economic turmoil, there's a lot of Americans find that opportunity challenge, that possibility challenge. And that certainly impels many to look westward.
Me, I resent my mortgage. Yeah. So much for my land. But that's because somebody else owns it, really. I mentioned Manifest Destiny in the intro. How aware were average Americans, those who will be embarking on this trail, of this idea? And was it any kind of real idea? factor in motivating people to move? Were they part of this sort of national mission?
So the term manifest destiny, the term itself doesn't get coined until the mid-1840s, until John L. O. Sullivan, who's a New York newspaper man writing for essentially a Democratic paper associated with Andrew Jackson's party and the primary expansionist party at the time, puts the phrase in there that it is our manifest destiny to overspread the continent.
But the idea, the idea of Manifest Destiny, of Americans' opportunity laying and claiming lands to the West, in those lands to the West becoming the place on which Americans would achieve, would bring the blessings of liberty and democracy, at least for themselves, never mind what would happen to the indigenous peoples of those areas, was certainly deeply embedded in American culture going back generations.
Yes, it's really something that I'm much more aware of having hosted this podcast for years now of this period of time, which is a mystery to a lot of Americans, this 1820s, 30s, 40s time period, which has a lot to do with this realization that we are a difference in the world is sort of democratic answer to monarchism in Europe and all that's what's happening in Europe still.
1848 year of revolutions i'm always wondering how much though people really understood this on the ground literally on the trail it also of course becomes useful to political elites to the politicians in washington this idea of this expansionism being grabbing land essentially being part of this this moving out there and growing this nation one family at a time right
So there's certainly, you know, the politics of expansionism is at the heart of a lot of what's going on in the 19th century and the contest over how that expansionism would take place dating back to the earliest days of the American Republic.
But certainly even the first party system that emerges in the 1790s, there's a profound division between the Federalists and Washington and Adams who take a relatively go slow approach to
to how westward expansion should take place, versus Thomas Jefferson, who becomes a much more unbridled advocate for opening up Western lands for white American farmers, and often they're African American slaves, and ejecting Indians from those lands. And that becomes the context. And then you have a lot of battles over land law, on what terms would the federal government make available land?
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Chapter 5: How did the Oregon Trail impact Native American communities?
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.
I mean, it must have been a remarkable story in the world, in Europe in particular, that this vastness of the North American continent was suddenly opening up.
to migration to settlement and and people in scandinavia and never mind ireland of course germans all had to be hearing about this as a kind of crazy phenomenon yeah and that continues through the 19th century again that just this opportunity the availability of land doesn't have any parallel in europe where most people were not going to achieve land ownership as a status
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.
When we come back after this break, we're going to get up close and personal and talk about what life was like out on the Oregon Trail.
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Chapter 6: What role did women play in the experiences on the Oregon Trail?
As you say, there are various routes that you could take on that thing, but it would take about four to six months. Is that fair to say?
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.
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 I suppose the further they went, the more confirmed they were in that feeling. I mean, it's hard life, those four or five months that you're in the middle there.
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Chapter 7: How has the Oregon Trail influenced American culture and mythology?
I mean, certainly most people knew to band together that doing it as a solo venture was not a wise idea. Yeah. That for a variety of reasons, people typically formed companies together, often signing various kinds of contracts and compacts about who would do what on the trail and how they would associate and what kinds of arrangements would prevail.
Oftentimes, especially by the later 1840s into the 1850s, established guides who made it a living, basically, Shepherding these caravans of wagon trains across the plains, across the mountains, across the intermountain desert and bringing them into the Pacific slope lands.
But the organization is what I'm always curious about, you know, because this is a vast operation. You have how many wagons made up the average train? It.
got larger and larger, especially later and later. In the early days, you know, it would be handfuls of wagons. But by the 1840s, sometimes the trains, especially at the height of the California Gold Rush years, when tens of thousands of people and hundreds of thousands in a few years across the early 1850s, late 1840s, early 1850s, were headed west.
Sometimes the wagon trains stretched miles and miles away. These were huge caravans by the height of the trail migration period. And you can imagine here, just imagine the dust that's kicked up by those kind of, sort of, and look, imagine what it was from the perspective of Native Americans On these lands, watching people cross through their territories.
And that actually is a really important question about their relations with native peoples along the way.
I do want to get to that, but I can understand the potential stench that's coming off of one of these dragon shells might be enough for Native Americans to say, yeah, go about your business. We're not anywhere close here. I'm kidding. Of course.
No, no. Oh, look, it's the same thing that cowboys who rode in the rear of cattle migrations up from Texas into Kansas, for example, the least attractive job was the cattle herder who was at the back of the herd. And likewise, riding in the back of these caravans was not necessarily the most pleasant experience in terms of dust and the other things that livestock emit.
We don't want to get into the details of that. They would follow landmarks on this trail, signposts, I suppose you call them. And these would be sort of morale boosters, I understand. The Platte River. Of course, they'd follow rivers.
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Chapter 8: What were the long-term legacies of the Oregon Trail migration?
Those were not wagon-friendly roads or trails. Instead, they went further south along the Platte, across South Pass, which was the critical way across the Rocky Mountains, a relatively gently sloped passage across the Continental Divide.
Had that not been available to wagoneers, it would have been impossible for the wagons to make it across the plains, to make it across the plains and then make it across the Rocky Mountains.
What would the average day experience be like? Slow going for the most part. Take me through the morning, afternoon and evening of an average wagon trail traveler.
Well, I think the first thing to emphasize is most people walked. So it was a great long walk. Yes, they had horses. Yes, they had oxen. Yes, they might have other livestock. But in order to lighten the loads of wagons and keep things moving, most people walked. So it was not just a wagon train. It was a great walk across half the continent. And that, of course, limits how far you could go.
There were certain chores that had to be done before you set out. Keep in mind, these are often families with lots of children. So you had to sort of make sure that everything was ready and going. And then the Great Walk, and then sort of after a day's walking, make camp, cook food, mend clothes, et cetera.
You know, it's often the case that the divergence between the experiences of men and women were quite profound on the trail. And you see that when you read the diaries of men and women. For men on the trail, they often write about this as the great adventure of their lives. Because here they're freed from the normal burdens of farm making, and they're off seeing the elephants.
Sometimes it includes their first time seeing bison, these great beasts that are in such great numbers still on the Great Plains, or seeing Indians for the first time, both scary but also exciting. Seeing landscapes and lands that are so unfamiliar and yet fascinating to them, so grand. For women, though, when you look at women's diaries and journals,
They rarely evince the same degree of excitement about this, the adventure of love, in part because for women, and if you follow that old couplet, you know, men could work from sun to sun because women's work was never done. That was especially true on the trail, where women's work sort of persisted all day long, all the normal things of life.
keeping households together in a sense, plus all of the difficulties of doing that under these most arduous conditions and continuing then into the evening and night. So I think that's really critical to sort of fasten on the difference between men's experiences of the Ogle Land Trail and women's experiences.
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