The Oregon Trail



The Oregon Trail is a 2,000-mile (3,200 km) historic east-west wagon route that connected the Missouri River to valleys in Oregon and locations in between. It flourished from the 1840s until the coming of the railroad at the end of the 1860s. The trip on foot took four to six months. It was the oldest of the northern commercial andemigrant trails and was originally discovered and used by fur trappers and traders in thefur trade from about 1811 to 1840. In its earliest days much of the future Oregon Trail was not passable to wagons but was passable everywhere only to men walking or riding horses and leading mule trains. By 1836, when the first Oregon wagon trains were organized at Independence, Missouri, the trail had been improved so much that it was possible to take wagons to Fort Hall, Idaho. By 1843 a rough wagon trail had been cleared to The Dalles, Oregon, and by 1846 all the way around Mount Hood to theWillamette Valley in the state of Oregon. What became called the Oregon Trail was complete even as improved roads, "cutouts", ferries and bridges made the trip faster and safer almost every year.

After 1840 steam-powered riverboats and steamboats traversing up and down the Ohio,Mississippi and Missouri rivers sped settlement and development in the flat region from the Appalachian mountains to the American Rocky Mountains. The boats serviced the jumping off points for wagon trains that crossed the mountains headed to rich farmlands in Oregon and California. With disputes with Spain and Britain settled by 1848, the new lands proved highly attractive. Getting there by sea meant either a very long trip around South America or through Panama—both were expensive and dangerous and took longer than walking.

The eastern part of the Oregon Trail spanned part of the future state of Kansas and nearly all of what are now the states of Nebraska and Wyoming. The western half of the trail spanned most of the future states of Idaho and Oregon. From various "jumping off points" in Missouri, Iowa or Nebraska, the routes converged along the lower Platte River Valley, near Fort Kearny, Nebraska Territory. Small steamboats carrying fur traders navigated the Missouri River up to the Yellowstone River in Montana as early as 1832. Larger steamboats traveling much above St. Joseph were blocked until dredging opened a bigger channel in 1852.