The Oregon Trail

by Rinker Buck

  The year before, during an epic four-thousand-mile round-trip on horseback between western New York and Wyoming to explore routes west to the Indian tribes, Marcus Whitman had already made a discovery that revolutionized western travel. While camping at the sprawling Green River fur-trapper rendezvous in Wyoming, he learned that an earlier expedition by Captain Benjamin Bonneville of the U.S. Army had traveled a thousand miles from the Missouri to western Wyoming with twenty heavily loaded covered wagons—the first known crossing by wagons along what would become the Oregon Trail route. Discussions with chiefs from the Shoshone and Nez Perce tribes convinced Whitman that wagons could cross the remaining thousand miles to the Pacific by following the Bear and Snake rivers through Idaho to Oregon.

  To reach the rich agricultural lands of the Pacific Northwest, wagons were considered vital. The trek of two thousand miles across the Rockies was so time-consuming and arduous that it would never be practical for farmers to push oxen or mules all the way to Oregon, stake a claim, clear some land, and then spend two additional summers traveling back for their families and bringing them out west. The first trip west would be the only journey. Farming was a family enterprise, and a completed family would be needed in the first year to clear land for crops and harvest trees for a house and barn.

  Missionary Narcissa Whitman, the first white woman to cross the Rockies, is largely forgotten today, but she had an immense impact on the development of the trail.

  By Narcissa Whitman’s day, the very concept of “pioneer” was associated with wagon travel, though at first the term implied traveling by foot. The derivation of the word is significant, a linguistic trace of America’s influences from Europe changing over time. The word began appearing in English in the sixteenth century, originating from a medieval Latin root, pedonem, meaning one who “goes on foot,” or foot soldier, which slightly changed meaning in the European Romance languages to become peon, a person of humble social status who was an infantry soldier, day laborer, or agricultural worker. In French, the word evolved into paonier and then pionnier, gradually acquiring new connotations as “one who clears land” and “one who goes first.”

  The Europeans spent most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in nonstop wars (the Thirty Years’ War, the Eighty Years’ War), and the word pionnier naturally acquired a military connotation. During the pan-European Seven Years’ War between 1756 and 1763, and later the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century, the pionnier (in English pioneer) units were small, highly mobile groups of sappers and engineers who occupied challenged ground first, to build roads, trenches, and fortifications, preparing the way for occupation by a larger army. On the American frontier, the term “pioneer” gradually assumed a civilian meaning for those who first explored new lands for farming development. The noun was probably introduced with the help of French Canadian trappers, many of whom were veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. In the Great Lakes region, and then the far West, the French trappers often returned east from their winter fur expeditions to find new settlers clearing forests in what they once considered wilderness, and they began calling these settlers pionniers.

  In the American context, pioneers became coupled with wagons because the distances that had to be covered were so vast, and forging into new country so far from civilization and settlement (pretty much an unknown experience in Europe) required material too bulky and heavy to carry on foot—furniture, farm implements, a full kitchen and wood shop. The perceived need for wagons was also driven by nineteenth-century gender attitudes, and real necessity. Because settling a wilderness farm without women and children was considered unrealistic, wagons were required so that the family could spend at least part of the day as passengers, reducing the agony of the journey. Backwoodsmen like Daniel Boone and Ethan Allen could disappear into the great forests for months alone, carrying just a small haversack, a musket, and a long knife. But bringing the family along required a mobile home away from home, both for the journey itself and for camping on a claim until a log cabin was built.

  But wagons were not yet a proven vehicle. Trips of five hundred or six hundred miles from Virginia or Pennsylvania to the frontier in Ohio or Indiana offered the challenge of crossing the Alleghenies over established freight routes, but this was relatively mild compared with two thousand miles clear across the Rockies. No one knew if the common farm wagon could sustain the trip across the blistering West without constant rebuilding.

  As the newlywed Marcus and Narcissa Whitman sleighed from western New York to Pittsburgh, where they would pick up a steamer to travel to Missouri, they had assigned themselves a mythic mission, something that had not been accomplished before. They would have to cross the arid plains and then the Rockies in a wagon capable of carrying females.

  In 1836, there was still enormous prejudice against this. The “heathenish” and dry far West beyond the Missouri River was not considered a fit place for white women, and to date the fur-trapping caravans had used only simple two-wheel carts pulled by donkeys. They carried supplies and pelts, not passengers. There was something suspicious, and even morally offensive to American values, about a man who would propose exposing delicate females to such risk. “Only parties of men could undergo the vicissitudes of the journey; none who ever made the trip would assert that a woman could have accompanied them,” said a writer for the influential New England Magazine in 1832. When he heard about the Whitmans’ plans, one of the most experienced western travelers, the explorer and Indian painter George Catlin, said that he would not take a “white female into that country for the whole continent of America.” New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley would later be credited with coining the motto of manifest destiny, “Go west, young man.” But initially Greeley was virulently opposed to western expansion and attacked trail leaders like Whitman. “For what, then, do they brave the desert, the wilderness, the savage, the snowy precipices of the Rocky Mountains, the weary summer march, the storm-drenched bivouac, and the gnawings of famine?” Greeley asked his Tribune readers in 1843. “Only to fulfill their destiny! There is probably not one among them whose outward circumstances will be improved by this perilous pilgrimage.”

  But the Whitmans defied this conventional wisdom, leaving Liberty, Missouri, in early April 1836 to rush across the Kansas plains with two wagons and catch up with a fur caravan that they would follow west along the Platte. What later became known as the First Whitman Crossing was one of the great American adventure tales, but the Whitmans’ prowess as travelers isn’t what made them famous or changed the course of history. It was Narcissa’s writing that popularized the idea of crossing the trail. In early June, when the Whitmans and their party were well along the Platte, they were met by an eastern-bound fur caravan and Marcus halted the wagons for an hour so that Narcissa could hastily pen an addendum to a letter back home to her family describing her trip. In the nineteenth century, personal letters were often shared with extended families and reprinted in both rural and large urban newspapers, and Narcissa had given her family permission to do this as a means of encouraging other missionaries to follow her path west.

  Whitman’s letters created a sensation when they were published back east, and even as far away as London. Her writing style about the “moving village” of the caravan and its trailing wagons was highly visual and charmingly self-effacing, and she confronted with telling detail American stereotypes about the West. The Whitman party suffered when the mules gave out, and occasionally had difficulty finding water and shade, but Narcissa clearly was thriving on the trail. She and Marcus learned to cook outdoors every night with buffalo dung for fuel, they loved elk and salmon steaks, and Narcissa rejoiced about having been liberated from a woman’s weekly chore of having to do the wash. She had made her cotton-ticking tent herself, and her description of bundling up inside it at night under woolen blankets made it sound like a cozy home on the plains. In her letters, Narcissa also gradually revealed her growing affection for Marcus, whom she referred to as “husband,”
lending a romantic patina to her journey. At night, in camp, Marcus sat on the prairie with his legs crossed so that Narcissa could use them as a chair while they ate their elk steaks. Later, readers would learn that Narcissa had conceived on the trail.

  Narcissa was a new woman out there on the plains. In Missouri, she had insisted on buying a riding horse and sidesaddle so that she could ride part of the day. That image was a potent one for nineteenth-century Americans. Women were not expected to ride astride a horse like men, except for members of the aristocracy for whom “equitation sport” was acceptable, so long as they rode the ungainly sidesaddle with both legs on the left side of the horse, to protect their skirts. (In foxhunting England, these equestriennes were called “amazones.”) But non-elite women like Narcissa Whitman were expected to travel by coach or buggy, or walk. Why Narcissa Whitman decided to ignore this social convention is unknown, but as a traveling schoolteacher she was probably already an accomplished rider. Her persona as a trailblazer who was a rider, not a sedentary wagon traveler, helped establish her unique appeal as an adventurous woman bent on proving that other American women could also brave the West.

  On cool mornings, Narcissa loved galloping sidesaddle ahead of the wagons on her new horse and even briefly losing sight of the party. Her practical observations about the plains had an immense impact on an American public that still considered wagon travel in the West impossible. The hard, arid soil of the prairie, for example, rutted evenly under wagon wheels—not at all like the sloppy, treacherous mud of the East. Two sentences of Narcissa’s from Nebraska, endlessly repeated in newspaper accounts of her crossing, probably contributed more than any other words to the westward migration: “It is astonishing how well we get along with our wagons where there are no roads. I think I may say that it is easier traveling here than on any turnpike in the States.”

  Americans were already wanderers by nature, and they didn’t need much prompting to dream of following Narcissa out beyond the Missouri. Another widely quoted passage made Americans feel that, by crossing the trail, they would be as free as a prairie lark.

  I wish I could discribe to you how we live so that you can realize it. Our manner of living is far preferable to any in the States. I never was so contented and happy before. Neither have I enjoyed such health for years. In the morn as soon as the day breaks the first that we hear is the word—arise, arise. Then the mules set up such noise as you never heard which puts the whole camp in motion.

  Whitman drew thousands of American families to consider emigrating across the frontier by frankly confronting their greatest fears, particularly about the Indian tribes. In Nebraska and Wyoming, the Pawnee and Shoshone hunting parties that the Whitman party met were invariably friendly and, in the evening, the braves lined up outside Narcissa’s tent and opened up the flap, just to see their first white woman. At remote military forts and trading posts, where the tribes gathered in the early summer to trade furs, Narcissa and Eliza were mobbed by squaws who were overjoyed to meet their first white women, and embraced them and kissed them on the cheeks.

  “After we had been seated awhile in the midst of the gazing throng,” Narcissa wrote, “one of the chiefs, whom we had seen before, came with his wife and very politely introduced her to us. They say they all like us very much, and thank God that they have seen us, and that we have come to live with them.”

  Nineteenth-century Americans were also terrified of rivers, and most families had either relatives or friends who had been carried away when bridges collapsed or coaches overturned at the river fords. But Whitman’s descriptions of the western rivers defied this image. In fact, the Platte and the Sweetwater were narrower and usually shallower than eastern rivers, with natural strata of sand and bottom rocks that made wagon crossings safe, though bumpy, in normal water conditions. Her rapturous accounts made the river crossings seem appealing, almost like a modern American weekend rafting adventure.

  As her party approached each river, throngs of Indian boys gathered on the banks, stripped to their loincloths, and dived into the current to swim the livestock and mules across. Then they swam back over in groups, laughing and amphibious, to steer the wagons across by lashing them to logs. Young braves competed fiercely to be on the team that carried the white women across to the far banks. Newspaper readers in America and Europe learned that Narcissa and Eliza rode the rivers in crafts of every conceivable description—stick baskets wrapped in buffalo hides called bull boats, dugouts, cottonwood rafts, and canoes made of animal skins and bark—with their saddles and trunks piled high around them.

  “O! if father and mother and the girls could have seen us in our snug little canoe, floating on the water,” Narcissa wrote from the Snake River in Idaho. “I once thought that crossing streams would be the most dreadful part of the journey. I can now cross the most difficult stream without the least fear.”

  Popular apprehension about the Indian tribes and the rivers, in short, was resolved by Narcissa Whitman’s letters back east. But Whitman provided even more for an American public deeply in need of new space but anxious about traveling beyond the western frontier. Liberated from a fixed house, the routine of chores, and village life back home, covered wagon travelers could discover an entirely new self out on the open plains. Living and foraging day by day under hooped canvas, amid spectacular scenery, was almost heaven on earth. One sentiment that Whitman introduced about the far West—that she was healthier and happier there than at any other time of her life—would be endlessly repeated in the hundreds of trail journals written by the pioneers over the next twenty years, and indeed presaged the sense of freedom on the plains that Willa Cather wrote about a century later.

  But the fame of the Whitman crossing also derived from the powerful, gender-breaking imagery that occurred three weeks after the wagons reached Fort Laramie in eastern Wyoming in mid-June. There, Marcus Whitman sensibly abandoned his heavier wagon, transferring supplies to a lighter Dearborn wagon and pack animals, to continue on through the rougher terrain of the Rocky foothills with a more maneuverable set of wheels. Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding no longer had a wagon to ride when they tired of their sidesaddles, and would make the rest of the journey either on horseback or walking. Near present-day Casper, Wyoming, the Whitmans and the caravan they were still following made a difficult high-water crossing of the Platte by stretching buffalo hides under their wagons for better flotation. The party then continued down through the dramatic channel of landmarks—Red Buttes, Avenue of the Rocks, and the Rattlesnake Hills—toward Independence Rock.

  A few days later, Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding galloped sidesaddle up a broad, slightly inclined plain high above the winding Sweetwater River. They were surrounded by dimpled hills and dramatic rock formations that climbed to 7,500 feet and then leveled for about a quarter of a mile to form a rounded summit. This was the fabled South Pass that the fur trappers had used since the 1820s. The pass, the benign opening in the Rockies that made the trail west possible, marks the Continental Divide, separating the drainages of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The views west from South Pass are spectacular. Vast sagebrush lands, rimmed by the foothills along the western face of the Rockies, stretch toward the rendezvous country along the Green River. Narcissa and Eliza paused at the top to rest their horses and wait for the wagon and the pack train, staring off toward the capacious vistas of the Green.

  It was an epochal moment for western migration, and few Americans who read about the women summiting South Pass failed to grasp the symbolism of their timing. It was July 4, 1836. The first white women had crossed the Rockies on Independence Day.

  • • •

  Marcus Whitman was fiercely determined to continue with his Dearborn wagon to Oregon, to disprove the skeptics who said it couldn’t be done. The Idaho extension of the trail along the Snake River that the Whitmans blazed that summer is strewn with lava-rock boulder fields, dramatic climbs up through the buttes, and difficult downhill slides, a terrain that battered a Dearb
orn never designed for such abuse. When his front axle broke, Whitman cut the wagon in half and continued on with the wagon rebuilt as a cart—a considerable feat of high-desert mechanics. When the mules started to give out farther along the Snake, he jettisoned Narcissa’s heavy traveling trunk, one of her last possessions from back east.

  “Farewell little Trunk,” Narcissa wrote. “I thank thee for thy faithful services & that I have been cheered by thy presence so long. Thus we scatter as we go along.”

  Near present-day Glenns Ferry, Idaho, when the Whitmans decided to risk a dangerous crossing to the north side of the Snake across a series of islands in the river, the cart capsized in the fiercely churning whirlpools between the islands, nearly drowning the mules. The Whitmans finally staggered into the old Hudson’s Bay Company trading post at Fort Boise, just a few miles from the border with Oregon, with exhausted mules and a cart hardly worthy of the name. Marcus finally conceded that it was time to abandon his prized wheeled transport and have the party walk and ride the rest of the way to the Cayuse country on the Walla Walla River.