59 pages • 1-hour read
Where the Lost Wander
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Background
Historical Context: The Oregon Trail
The Oregon Trail was the 19th-century overland route taken during one of America’s largest mass migrations. From the early 1840s to the late 1860s, more than 300,000 people traveled over the 2,000-mile trail, going from starting places mostly along the Missouri River to destinations in Oregon Territory, Utah Territory, and California. Some were simply escaping hardship in Eastern cities, while others wanted land to farm, which was made available through the Homestead Act.
Pioneers traveled in trains of dozens of covered wagons for safety and in order to share duties. The hardier travelers walked alongside their wagons, making about 15-20 miles each day. To avoid snow that would make mountains impassable, the journey began each spring and took about six months.
Pioneers began their trek westward by following the Platte River through present-day Kansas and Nebraska, where they encountered a trading post at Fort Kearny. They then followed the Platte River to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and crossed the Rocky Mountains to reach their next trading post, Fort Hall, Idaho. At this point, they branched off depending on their final destination: Some went southwest to Utah and California, and others continued westward, following the Snake River through Idaho and Oregon, crossing the Blue Mountains, and traveling down the Columbia River to end points in Oregon.
Pioneers experienced numerous hardships, from illness (especially cholera), flooded rivers, and unpredictable weather. Food supplies could run out, and water was often scarce. Use of the trail declined with the advent of the transcontinental railroad in 1869.
Cultural Context: The Indigenous Experience of the Westward Expansion
After the United States acquired the Oregon and California territories (in 1846 and 1848, respectively), the government attracted settlers by offering them land. Much of the territory traversed by the Oregon Trail pioneers was occupied by Indigenous Americans, including the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Sioux, Shoshoni (also spelled Shoshone), Pawnee, Crow, Walla Walla, Cayuse, and Umatilla. Emigrants encountered the Pawnee, whose story is part of Where the Lost Wander, as they reached the basin of the Platte River.
While most Indigenous groups were friendly toward the pioneers, some conflicts arose with settlers, especially after the 1850s, when hostility grew in response to white Americans’ acts of hostility and ethnic cleansing in Western lands. The Indigenous peoples had suffered forcible displacement—most notably during the notorious Trail of Tears (1830-50)—and the systematic destruction of their food sources, including buffalo. Faced with ongoing persecution and discrimination, some Indigenous people began to retaliate. For example, the first European Americans to build in Oregon Country, missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, attempted to convert the Cayuse people. The Indigenous people eventually killed the Whitmans and the other settlers in their mission. Such conflicts were typically more detrimental to the Indigenous people involved, however. Records indicate that between 1840 and 1860, Indigenous peoples killed 362 emigrants, while the emigrants killed 426 Indigenous people.
Disease spread by the pioneers, including measles, was often devastating, and groups that resisted resettlement, such as the Comanches, were eventually crushed and forcibly removed. The 1887 Dawes Act authorized the government to break up tribal lands into small allotments for farming—an attempt to destroy traditional Indigenous ways of life and forcibly assimilate the Indigenous people into white American culture. Starting in 1879, other attempts to assimilate Indigenous people included forcibly removing children and sending them to boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their own languages, given English names, and frequently treated harshly.
Following the Civil War, armed battles between Federal troops and Indigenous tribes led to massive bloodshed. The 1890 massacre of 150 Sioux at Wounded Knee in South Dakota by US soldiers effectively ended armed conflicts against the government.
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