The Oregon Trail Reserve: Where the Ruts Are Still There
Near Boise, Idaho
On the southeastern edge of Boise, in a seventy-seven-acre open space preserve overlooking the city, you can stand on ground that hasn't changed much since the eighteen forties. The wagon ruts are still there, shallow channels worn into the earth by hundreds of thousands of wheels and hooves, visible as long depressions in the grass if you know where to look.
Between eighteen forty-three and eighteen sixty-nine, several hundred thousand emigrants crossed the two-thousand-mile Oregon Trail from Missouri to the Oregon Territory. The five hundred miles through Idaho were among the hardest, relentless desert heat, scarce water, and a Snake River that had to be crossed multiple times without bridges. By the time travelers reached the Boise area, they had already been on the trail for months. The cottonwoods along the Boise River were the first real shade most of them had seen in weeks.
The Hudson's Bay Company's Fort Boise, established in eighteen thirty-four at the confluence of the Boise and Snake Rivers near present-day Parma, served as the last major supply point before emigrants pushed into Oregon. It was operated by French-Canadian fur traders with a mostly Hawaiian workforce, and gave exhausted wagon companies a chance to trade, repair equipment, and rest.
The Oregon Trail Reserve preserves a section of the trail in southeast Boise that still shows wagon-road topography. Boise has also installed twenty-one obelisk monuments downtown marking the trail's route through the city. The emigrants who carved these ruts into the ground were not passing through. They were on their way to their entire lives. The ruts stayed.
