Westward Ho the Wagons

I can remember many years ago watching or listening to  various programs that ended with some form of the phrase – “and the rest is history.”

 In 1841 when the Bidwell-Bartleson party headed west the rest was indeed history. This first great wagon train heading west not only made history, but it also led to the populating of the West and later the middle of the country. The next year, 1842, Dr. Elijah White led a group of more than 100 on the all new Oregon Trail. Two years later four wagon trains carried more than 2,000 hopefuls West.  The next year the numbers more than doubled. By 1869 more than half a million people had traveled along the trail to Oregon, California, and later to the Salt Lake Valley of present-day Utah. 

Trail Ruts cut deep from thousands of wagons - Guernsey Wyoming

The goal for all of these travelers was the same. Make the 2,000 plus mile trip in 150 days taking along enough food and finding enough fresh water along the way to make it.  Taking a day a week off, as most trains did, this would mean the wagons needed to average about 15 miles each day six days each week for five months. Today if we drove for eight hours each day for 130 days averaging 60 miles per hour we could circle the earth two and a half times. What does all this mean? The west coast was a long way to travel, farther than anywhere on earth in today's world. Once the new would-be settlers started west, in all likelihood, they could never go back. What a commitment these people were making. 

A view down the trail. When the first wagons came there were not nearly
as many trees along the North Platte River as today

All of the above are my thoughts as we get ready to take off on a 4,000-mile vacation next week,  and we will only be gone 16 or 17 days. My, how times have changed.

Fall at Fort Laramie, the most famous, and most welcome stop on the trail.

Is That a Wagon in My Back Yard ?

My wife and I have had several discussions as to whether the Oregon or Mormon Trails passed through our back yard. Why, because we live only a quarter of a mile from the North Platte River.

Looking back at the North Platte River  from Deep Ruts Hill

The trails were not a path but an area of many paths. In some places in Wyoming, the trails are many miles wide from north to south. All of the wagons west did not follow in the ruts of others. Here in Guernsey, Wyoming there are ruts within a stone’s throw of the trail and some several miles away.

In  places, wagons cut the soft rock

Where the view of the river was lost often a deer or buffalo trial was followed. These trails, early on known as trapper trails, would eventually become the famous trails west. Wilson Price Hunt’s route west to Astoria became the approximate course of the Oregon Trail. But it was Robert Stuart’s path along the North Platte River that perfected the trail.

Flower lined game trail

The Oregon and Mormon trails became the greatest highways of American history expanding America to the Pacific Ocean. The Indians called it the Great Medicine Road of the whites. Yes, there were settlers in Oregon before the trail and thousands of people in California. But now there was a way for the common man to go west. And for the first time the Indian lands of the west became fair game for new settlement.  

Wagon's West - The Years

The first wagon train to the west coast passed through Fort Laramie in 1841. When I taught Wyoming History I was often asked, “What years did people travel on the Oregon Trail”? Well, there’s the answer, or at least part of it, the Oregon Trail was first traveled in 1841.

Trail Ruts Near Guernsey Wyoming, 13 miles West of the Fort

On the Grounds of Fort Laramie today

        This first train west, was organized and captained by adventurer John Bartleson who set the entire trip up with no real knowledge of the west and certainly not enough knowhow to lead a large group of people overland to California.

Even Today Mountain Men Can Be Found Camping at the Fort

So how did he do it? Easy, he tagged on with a group of Jesuit missionaries heading west. The difference was that the missionaries knew they needed a guide, and they hired one, a good one. Thomas “Broken Hand,” Fitzpatrick led the group of missionaries and Bartleson’s wagon train into Idaho where his duties to the Jesuit’s ended. From that point on the train traveled with the advice and hand drawn maps of ‘Broken Hand’ and with a lot of luck, some of it bad, made it to the coast.

It should be noted that parts of the trail were traveled as early as 1836 and trappers started laying out this route as early as 1810 or 11.

Nearly forgot, when did travel on the trails west end? Most historians agree around 1869. Who needed a wagon, by then they had a railroad?