The Oregon Trail: What Passed Through Here

Between eighteen forty-three and eighteen sixty-nine, roughly a quarter million people traveled past the bluffs rising above this valley on their way to Oregon, California, or the Utah Territory. They walked. Most of them walked the entire two thousand miles, reserving the wagons for supplies and the sick and the very young, because the oxen pulling a loaded wagon could not also carry adult passengers without breaking down somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.

The Oregon Trail was not one road. It was a braided swath of parallel tracks, sometimes a mile wide, carved by wagons that spread out to find the smoothest ground. Near landmarks and river crossings it narrowed into a tight corridor, and those are the places where the ruts were pressed deepest. The emigrant season ran from late April, when the prairie grass was tall enough to feed the animals, to mid-August, when the mountain passes had to be crossed before the first snows.

At Scotts Bluff, emigrants were about four hundred miles into their journey. They had crossed the Missouri River, left the settlements behind, and traveled through weeks of grassland that seemed to have no end. The bluff was their first sight of something that felt like a destination, or at least a waypoint with a name. Journal writers describe relief at seeing it, and also awe. Amelia Stewart Knight wrote in eighteen fifty-three that the bluffs here look beautiful, some perfectly white and others shaded with purple. Frances Sawyer wrote simply: grand and sublime.

The route effectively ended in eighteen sixty-nine, when the transcontinental railroad was completed. The last great emigrant trains passed through in eighteen sixty-eight. Within a few years the trail was quiet, the wagon ruts were grassing over, and the landscape that had hosted the largest peacetime overland migration in history belonged again to the cattlemen and eventually to the homesteaders who stayed.