The Oregon and Mormon Trails

Nebraska was not a destination for most of the emigrants who crossed it. It was the passage. Between eighteen forty and eighteen sixty-nine, somewhere near five hundred thousand people followed the Platte River valley west toward Oregon, California, or the Mormon settlements in Utah. Nebraska was the long middle section of their journey, the place where the Great Plains announced itself and the emigrants began to understand how much distance remained.

The trails crossed the Missouri at several points and merged on the south bank of the Platte, following the river's shallow, braided channel west through the grass. Landmarks mattered enormously to travelers with no other navigation. Above all, Chimney Rock, a spire of volcanic clay rising three hundred feet above the North Platte valley in western Nebraska, was the single most-mentioned geographic feature in emigrant diaries of the whole route from Missouri to the Pacific.

The ruts left by wagons on the Oregon Trail are still visible in some places in Nebraska, pressed so deeply into the plains soil that they have survived more than a hundred and fifty years of weather. They are most evident in places where the prairie has never been plowed, where the grass has grown over the tracks but not erased them.

The trails also carried disease, disrupted bison herds, and transformed the ecology of the corridor they crossed. The Great Migration was not neutral. It changed what it passed through, and the people who were already living on those plains bore the consequences.