This being America, bustling centers of commerce began to pop up at the trailheads. “A multitude of shops had sprung up to furnish the emigrants . . . with necessaries for their journey,” wrote Francis Parkman, “and there was incessant hammering and banging from a dozen blacksmiths’ sheds, where heavy wagons were being repaired, and the horses and oxen shod. The streets were thronged with men, horses and mules.”
Parkman didn’t care much for the migrants, or indeed for such Indians as he met along the way. He was an indefatigable snob, a New England swell with money, ambition, courage, and a Harvard education. His academic brilliance (he was a fine horticulturist) won him a professorship; his historical writings won him prizes, standing, a great monument, a school with his name on it, and his face on a postage stamp. But his account of the Oregon Trail is wanting, in all too many aspects.
Even the title is scarcely true: he completed only a third of the journey, and then only the easy bits. A Summertime Trip to Laramie would have been a more suitable title—not only geographically accurate (that is the farthest point he reached, scarcely a third of the way out from Omaha) but also underscoring the fact that his relatively simple eight-week journey, involving more mountain sighting than crossing, was for him a mere wheeze, “a summer jaunt,” as he put it. His disdainful take on the expedition left him scarcely able to grasp the true historical importance of what he was seeing. He claimed that the true motives of most of the emigrants were a source of great puzzlement to him; they had in common only that they were “some of the vilest outcasts of the country,” many of whom eventually “repent[ed] of the journey,” and were “happy enough to escape from it.”
The quality of Parkman’s prose disguises the dubious quality of the facts; his style, a poor stand-in for substance. In fact we do know rather well why the emigrants went. We do know how many—or more properly, how few—repented of their adventure and went back home: no more than 10 percent, the figure falling steadily as the trail became more familiar. Moreover, we know that almost none of these turn-arounds or go-backs, as they were called, were happy with their choice. More often they simply reset themselves, pulled themselves together, and tried again.
In the year of 1840 that saw the departure of the first true pioneers, Joel Walker and his family—and their successful arrival six months later in Oregon—a total of just thirteen people made the journey. The following year, it was twice that number; three years later, nearly three thousand went. Soon so many tens of thousands of pioneers were going, so long were the trains of wagons, that perplexed Indians in Wyoming said they might themselves head off to the East, believing it to be fast emptying of all white people. The ruts left by the little white-canvas-sided prairie schooners—or more rarely by the three-ton Conestoga wagons, with their iron-rimmed monster wheels, ten-oxen teams, and wickedly large turning circles—were ground so deep into the prairie earth that they can still be seen today.
In places, the Oregon Trail was fully ten miles wide, with wagons veering wildly away from one another as the steersmen took different tacks to divert around the obstacles ahead. In others, it narrowed sharply, the ruts all commingling, incised ever more deeply into the earth. The Bureau of Land Management, which looks after the public lands of the American West, has seen to it that in many places these gatherings of ruts are preserved: they are easily visible at the great historic site of South Pass, in western Wyoming, for instance.
They can be seen just a few yards off State Route 28, which crosses the Continental Divide here. You step away from the pavement and onto the sagebrush, and there is the track, with its two parallel lines of hard-packed yellow dirt, a wagon-width apart, fading into the horizon. It is 7,500 feet up here, and you might take a few moments to catch your breath. But then if you stand here for a few moments, looking west as a chill breeze from ahead whistles through the short grass, making your eyes water, and the new snow on the peaks of the Wind River Range to the north glints in the evening sun, two things are worth pondering.
The first is the simple political importance of the place. Jedediah Smith, the great trailblazer of the Victorian West, was fully aware of its value. He reported that this was the one certain way through which wagons could cross the Rockies, the one certain road along which people in limitless numbers might one day cross the Great Divide. By urging settlers to cross here, creaking their wagons up from the valley head of the Sweetwater River (a stream whose waters were bound eventually for the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic by way of the Platte, the Missouri, and the Mississippi) and then down the far side to the headwaters of the Green River (which joins the Colorado and passes through the Grand Canyon to the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean), he left an indelible imprint on the human geography of America.
For until that moment of discovery, places like California and the Oregon Country were months away, reachable for Americans only by boat up the West Coast, and then only by way of foreign countries like Panama or Argentina, Chile, and Peru. But now, thanks to the happy presence of the South Pass—with its slope “no more toilsome than the ascent of the Capitol Hill from the avenue, at Washington,” as John Frémont had it—Americans could get to the West Coast territories directly. In time, they could get there quickly.
Continentalism—the notion that had been so eloquently advocated by John Quincy Adams in his 1811 letter home—was then swiftly realized. America’s Manifest Destiny became a sure reality; the Pacific coast became America’s sole remaining frontier; and in time, and for a while, the Pacific Ocean became an essentially American ocean.
And one can go further. The many transpacific ventures in which America has been subsequently involved—the colonization of the Philippines, the annexation of Guam and the Marianas and Micronesia, the assistance given to China, the war with Japan, the conflict in Vietnam, the bombing of Cambodia—all have their roots in America’s own continental ambitions, which the discovery of the South Pass in western Wyoming ultimately made possible. A Bureau of Land Management official who takes visitors to see the rutted roadstead beside Route 28 says that more than a few veterans of the Vietnam War become visibly distressed on understanding this history, on realizing a connection far less tenuous than it first might seem. A great deal of recent world history had its origins in this wide, windy, and featureless pass.
In the first years of the trails’ existence, most of those who went out west had guides. They took guides in part because the route was still uncertain, but they also took them—at no small expense—as guardians and morale boosters. For the pessimism of many Easterners was widespread: to try to cross the country by land, it was said by many, was the sheerest folly. There would be mountains suitable only for goats or Sherpas, deserts that only the Bedouin could manage, hostile Indians,* unavoidable and incurable diseases, unbridgeable rivers, sour waters, the risk of starvation, the onslaught of terrible storms, the wrath of various gods. It was a six-month ticket to hell, they said: far better either to go west by ship or to stay home, safe and dry.
For those who chose to ignore the Cassandras and go, a strong and able mountain man acting as guide could act as guardian angel of sorts and shepherd the weaklings through. In the early days, it might cost a dollar a person for such a man to accompany the trip to Fort Hall, the outpost in eastern Idaho beyond which the going got especially rough. Eighty dollars in all could then buy you a guide onward from Idaho through the mountains and to the coast. A very few mountain men might be persuaded do the entire journey with you, Independence to Chimney Rock to forts Laramie and Bridger, then on through the South Pass to Fort Hall and across the ranges to Fort Walla Walla and the Pacific—and all for $500 in advance asked, $250 actually given.
But that was in the early days: as the trail ruts deepened and gave the road a look almost of permanence, as the bridges became sturdier and more numerous, as the ferries became more reliable (avoiding the need for fordings took a month off the normal six-month journey), and as the en route campsites took on the look of small villages
, with outfitters and blacksmiths and wagon shops and hardware stores, so the need for guides started to diminish: a man who could get a dollar per person for a crossing in 1840 could barely expect twenty-five cents for each wagonload five years on.
The right wagon was essential. The Conestogas were generally disliked, being too big and heavy and requiring more oxen or mules to haul them than most could afford. The smaller linseeded-cottonwood-sided schooners, made by wagon-and-wheelbarrow firms like Studebaker and sold in the jumping-off towns, were better suited to the rough roads. To haul them, most migrants used oxen: slow though the animals might be, they wouldn’t wander far at night and weren’t of much interest to the occasional inquisitive Indians. Mules were a second choice; horses became popular only when there were depots selling oats and bran along the way.
Everyone, the stock driver included, walked alongside the wagon; the vehicles were reserved for cargo. And despite their pygmy size, their design allowed them to carry quite enough for a family of four or five. They could certainly carry enough dry food—flour, coffee, beans, cornmeal, dried bacon, rice—for a typical journey. There were so many buckets, lamps, washtubs, spare bridles and tack, replacement wheels, saucepans, chains, toolboxes, tin plates and cups, and cages of chickens that the wagons rattled and clanged like a mobile scrap heap, each jolt against a rock setting off a terrific cannonade of sound. Those who loaded their wagons with family heirlooms—spinning wheels, finely carved beds and chairs, canteens of chased silver, and elegant lanterns that swung from the ceiling ridgepoles—found they soon had to discard them and dump everything on the trailside.
It became customary to have cattle, sheep, and goats walking alongside the wagon as a mobile food supply, with the family keeping them all in line. Usually someone carried a rifle, not so much for protection from the Indians, who in the early years were generally less troublesome than the doomsayers foretold, as to shoot game. There were plenty of buffalo in the early years, before they were quite wiped out; there were antelope, deer, geese, and elks, and even the occasional bear.
There were fish to catch, and in the Western rivers there were salmon, which the Indians were happy to sell, as they were also happy on the farther plains to sell the potatoes and vegetables that visiting trappers and clergymen had taught them how to grow.
And yet, withal, in a spirit of rough camaraderie, with campfires and sing-alongs and Good Samaritanism more notable than sparring and violence and competition, they made it. Most—more than 90 percent—of them reached their destinations—usually farmlands in the Willamette Valley, close to where Portland is today.
Between 1840 and 1869, between the Walkers’ leaving and the rail-joining ceremony at Promontory Summit, as many as four hundred thousand went. There had been a pause for the Civil War, which disrupted this progress, even from so far away. But along all of the trails—those to Oregon itself, to San Francisco, to Salt Lake City, to Santa Fe—men and women and children walked and rode, and they did so with one vision in mind: to employ the saying that became so common at the time, they went off “to see the elephant.” They went off to have that transcendental emotional experience that it sometimes seems is available only to those who take part in such a raw and extraordinary and draining experience. They all went west to get somewhere, true; but they went also for the greater reasons, like getting to see all there is to see. Most of them survived. Only a few turned back—and even those few who did played their part, too, bringing the mails with them to let those back east know how their more courageous compatriots were doing, allowing their wagons to be scavenged for spare parts, handing over supplies for the onward crowds.
The countryside over which these armies of migrants crossed is some of the most desolate and beautiful in all creation. But even in their crossing it, the travelers did not really come to know it. To almost all of them, the American West was a vastness that had to be crossed, not considered. The plains, passes, and peaks were all to be endured, not analyzed. The destinations were what counted most.
Yet unknown to them and to everyone, the territory over which they journeyed was filled with an unimagined and unimaginable wealth. It was a wealth waiting to discovered, to be revealed and then related to the nation as a whole. And as the first phase of travel across its immensity wound down, and after the nation had for four wretched years halted all self-inquiry while convulsed in its terrible Civil War, then the United States government made its official decision. The West had now been won. But what was the West, exactly? America would now begin the business of finding out.
THE WEST, REVEALED
There were still immense blank spaces to fill on every map. During what today’s government historians like to call the country’s Great Reconnaissance, a mighty effort was put into unraveling the mysteries of the lands that lay between the hundredth meridian and the Pacific Coast. Detachments of elite and scientifically trained soldiers, formally known as topographical engineers, were sent into the most remote nooks and crannies of the nation, prizing out and chasing the details, noting and mapping all the arroyos and creeks and tarns and overlooked hillocks and canyons that made up the landscape, suggesting routes for roads and sites for the piers of bridges, and building the forts from which all these newly found regions might be further surveyed, organized, and policed.
These were men who were dispatched across the country by their superiors based at the West Point Military Academy on the west bank of the Hudson—which then was not a school for teaching warfare, tactics, and leadership, but rather the country’s foremost engineering college. Within America’s nineteenth-century military community, engineers were marked out as the elite. It was thought far nobler to discover a mountain pass or to climb a peak and map its height than ever it was to fire a gun and storm a rampart.
The orders sent out to the engineers in the field, whether they were sent to the snow-covered northern plains, to the swamps and deserts of the south, or into the rugged ranges of the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, invariably concluded with a command, majestic in its simplicity, to “permit nothing worthy of notice to escape your attention.” This the men did, with dedication and determination, and in doing so produced endless tonnages of reports and maps to show what they had found. And yet, as with those builders who laid the foundations rather than provided the finishing flourishes of a great structure, few of them achieved much lasting fame.
Stephen Long of the Yellowstone expedition is better known than many; Lieutenant Eliakim Scammon, preparer of the first accurate map of the upper Missouri Valley, rather less so. But of them all, John Frémont owns the name perhaps most recognized, not least because he was also one of the first two senators from the newly formed state of California, and then in 1856 ran as the first presidential candidate of the newly formed Republican party.* It was to be his exploration and survey work that remained his greater legacy. Not for nothing was he known as the Great Pathfinder, and his expeditions did much to open up the untracked corners of the country. “The occupation of my prime of life,” he once declared, was to be “among Indians and in waste places.”
Frémont’s explorations and foragings took him and his fellow topographers into regions that were still not yet part of the United States. Texas, for instance, had been an independent nation for a decade until the United States annexed it in 1845. Oregon had long been tussled over by both Washington and London until Britain gave up and gave in the year after. And the biggest tract of all—half a million square miles of territory stretching west from present-day Wyoming to the Pacific and south from the Columbia River to Tijuana, and which had been ruled from Mexico City, first by the Viceroyalty of New Spain and then by the newly independent Mexico—was handed to the United States by treaty in 1848.
The engineers of the corps were men who vanished for months and years at a time into the wilderness, content with their anonymity, happy to be forgotten. Their experiences were as varied as the countryside they surveyed. In Texas and the deserts of the Southwest, the topographer
s used camels, eighty of which were captured by the Confederacy during the Civil War, became officially prisoners of war, and escaped into the wilderness and died.
One expedition into the San Juan Mountains, near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, got itself lost and stranded in deep snow; the troopers watched as their mules dropped dead one by frozen one; then they ran out of food, tried in vain to trap mice, and finally lost eleven colleagues from their party of thirty. When the survivors returned to base, charges of cannibalism went around, and John Frémont said of the expedition leader, a man named Williams, that “in starving times no man who ever knew him walked in front of Bill Williams.”
Another party, who took an iron boat named the Explorer into the Black Canyon of the lower Colorado River, came across an Indian of what they considered such staggering ugliness that one of their number, a German visitor attached to the party, voted to kill him, pickle him in alcohol as a zoological specimen, and take him back to New York for forensic inspection. The proposal was rejected, however, and the hapless man lived.
Relations with Indians were often very poor and, more often than not, lethal. But if the skirmishes with Native Americans did not prove lethal enough, then drinking a libation known as trader whiskey probably did: a party of engineers looking for dinosaur bones near the Nebraska-Wyoming line reported being plied frequently with this foul-looking brew, made of goodness knows what and by goodness knows whom, which they reported had been spiked with especially rank fillers, including chewing tobacco, red-hot peppers, and, in some instances, the heads of dead rattlesnakes.
The 1,800-mile boundary with Mexico was fixed by teams of these remarkable men—one of whom, William Emory, had previously performed similar duties along the very much longer western part of the 49th parallel that formed the frontier with Canada. He, like so many of his brother “topogs,” as they were amiably known, was very much more than a mapmaker: he collected and named scores of plant specimens and kept detailed notes of the more peaceable Indians he met along the way, notes that are valued still as anthropological studies. He had a Texas mountain named after him, and more recently an army fort, but like so many of his colleague officers, he is today otherwise precious little remembered.