The Oregon Trail

Discover the remarkable history of the Oregon Trail...
Imagine that you are about to begin a journey with your family in a small wagon drawn by a team of oxen. You have sold everything you own to buy this wagon, but it lacks any form of suspension meaning that you will feel every jarring bump as it travels painfully slowly at around two miles (three kilometers) per hour. On a good day, you may cover perhaps 20 miles (30 kilometers). But the journey you are undertaking will cover more than 2,000 miles (3,000 kilometers), not on roads, but through uncharted, inhospitable, and often hostile wilderness and in variable weather. Completing this journey will take six months or more, and around one in every ten people who set out will die on the way due to disease, injury, starvation, or deliberate attack.

Few people today would even consider such a trek, yet this mammoth journey was undertaken by hundreds of thousands of ordinary people during the mid-nineteenth century as they traveled from the Eastern United States to new territory on the Pacific Coast. The route they followed became known as the Oregon Trail, stretching west from Missouri until it finally led through the mountains toward Utah, Oregon, and California. In just 20 years, from 1840 to 1860, an astounding 400,000 people faced the danger and uncertainty of an epic migration on the Oregon Trail. They did this to follow a dream of forging a new life in the West, facing hardship and risk at every mile. This is their amazing story.

Discover a plethora of topics such as

• Origins: The Peoria Party
• The Great Migration: 1843
• Life and Death on the Oregon Trail
• Gold!
• Mormons on the Oregon Trail
• Decline of the Trail
• And much more!