Unfortunately, however, not all the books were accurate and left some settlers lost and in danger of running out of provisions. Trail guides wrote guidebooks, so settlers no longer had to bring an escort with them on their journey. Settlements and additional supply posts appeared along the way which gave weary travelers a place to rest and regroup. Bridges and ferries were built to make water crossings safer.

Over time, conditions along the Oregon Trail improved. It also became a graveyard for tens of thousands of pioneer men, women and children and countless livestock. As more and more settlers headed west, the Oregon Trail became a well-beaten path and an abandoned junkyard of surrendered possessions. Travelers often left warning messages to those journeying behind them if there was an outbreak of disease, bad water or hostile American Indian tribes nearby. It was not uncommon for people to be crushed beneath wagon wheels or accidentally shot to death, and many people drowned during perilous river crossings. Most people died of diseases such as dysentery, cholera, smallpox or flu, or in accidents caused by inexperience, exhaustion and carelessness. According to the Oregon California Trails Association, almost one in ten who embarked on the trail didn’t survive.

Some settlers looked at the Oregon Trail with an idealistic eye, but it was anything but romantic. Some people continued south into California. Then they crossed the desert to Fort Hall, the second trading post.įrom there they navigated Snake River Canyon and a steep, dangerous climb over the Blue Mountains before moving along the Columbia River to the settlement of Dalles and finally to Oregon City. So many people added their name to the rock it became known as the “Great Register of the Desert.”Īfter leaving Independence Rock, settlers climbed the Rocky Mountains to the South Pass.

The settlers gave a sigh of relief if they reached Independence Rock-a huge granite rock that marked the halfway point of their journey-by July 4 because it meant they were on schedule. While Lewis and Clark had made their way west from 1804 to 1806, merchants, traders and trappers were also among the first people to forge a path across the Continental Divide. Missionaries Blaze the Oregon Trailīy the 1840s, the Manifest Destiny had Americans in the East eager to expand their horizons. Without the Oregon Trail and the passing of the Oregon Donation Land Act in 1850, which encouraged settlement in the Oregon Territory, American pioneers would have been slower to settle the American West in the 19th century. The trail was arduous and snaked through Missouri and present-day Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and finally into Oregon. The Oregon Trail was a roughly 2,000-mile route from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon, which was used by hundreds of thousands of American pioneers in the mid-1800s to emigrate west.

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