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The route would become so crowded with wagons that the first several days were often spent simply getting all the wagons on the road.įrom Independence, Missouri, the wagon trains traveled northwest to Fort Kearny, Nebraska. On an agreed-upon day, the wagon train began its journey. After enough members of a new wagon train had assembled at the jumping-off point, they would meet to elect officers, adopt rules of conduct, and select their guide. Arriving travelers arranged to join a wagon train, an organized caravan of wagons with a guide to lead the way across the continent. Each spring, thousands of wagons would gather in these towns. Joseph, or Westport in Missouri or Omaha or Council Bluffs in Nebraska. When they reached a port, the travelers boarded their wagon on a steamship and sailed to a “jumping-off point”-usually Independence, St. They loaded their wagons with tools, equipment, and a few family treasures, and, leaving behind everything they had ever known for an unknown land, set off for the closest port on the Missouri River. They also needed oxen to pull the wagon, and possibly other livestock for food. With the proceeds, they outfitted their wagon with hundreds of pounds of food-enough to last them through the difficult six-month journey. The migration usually started in early spring with the sale of their house or farm. Most people planning to migrate west on the Oregon Trail were people of middle income-many of them families. Thousands poured into California-most by sea, but many using the Oregon Trail and the California connecting route. This changed after 1848, following the California gold rush and after the Mexican-American War (1846–48) had resulted in Mexico ceding California and New Mexico to the United States. Prior to 1849, most of the travelers on the Oregon Trail were heading for Oregon. In 1846, there were so many U.S.settlers in Oregon that England knew it could not defend its claim there and, after lengthy negotiations, ceded the territory to the United States. The numbers continued to dramatically increase.
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In 1844, 1,500 people made the trip, arriving in either Oregon or California. That year 1,000 people in 120 wagons set out on the Oregon Trail. Suddenly in 1843, the Oregon Trail was crowded with travelers. These overland successes launched the spirit of westward fever. The next year, 125 people in wagons made the trip to Oregon, which the United States and Britain jointly occupied. Only about 35 people finished the long, difficult journey. They were heading for California, then a sparsely populated region of Mexico. In 1841, a few small wagon trains set off from Independence, Missouri, on the Oregon Trail. Though the missionaries had little effect on the religious beliefs of the Native Americans, their success in getting to Oregon via the overland route made a large impact on friends and family back home. The Methodist Church sent missionaries to Oregon in 18. Presbyterian missionaries Marcus Whitman (1802–1847) and Narcissa Whitman (1808–1847) made the trip with three other missionaries in 1836, settling among the Cayuse Indians in the Walla Walla River valley in present-day Washington State. The first people to travel the Oregon Trail in covered wagons were missionaries. It was primarily fur trappers and frontiersmen on horseback and on foot who forged the Oregon Trail from the earlier routes. The route established by the Lewis and Clark expedition, though, was too rough to be traveled by wagon. explorers to use the Indian trails to find their way across the continent to the Pacific Coast in 1803. Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) and William Clark (1770–1838) were the first U.S. The Oregon Trail originated in the routes established by extensive Native American trade networks that had existed for centuries. Most of the early travelers along the route sought a new home and better opportunities in the West.
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Travelers going to California could take the Oregon Trail to Idaho, where a connecting trail would take them into California. It was used primarily from the 1840s through the 1870s for migration by wagon, horse, or foot to Oregon Territory, which comprised present-day Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and parts of Montana and Wyoming. The Oregon Trail was a 2,000-mile route running overland across the North American continent from the Missouri River in the East to the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.