The Oregon Trail: End of the Road in the Willamette Valley

The advertisement that ran in Missouri newspapers in the spring of eighteen forty-three called it the Great Migration. About a thousand people responded, hitched their oxen, and headed west. They would travel roughly two thousand miles on foot and by wagon, crossing the Great Plains, climbing the Rockies, crossing the high desert of what is now Idaho, and descending into the Columbia River country. They were aiming for the Willamette Valley.

They had heard about the valley from missionaries, from fur traders, from promotional pamphlets that described a paradise of mild rains and fertile black soil. Most of that description was accurate. What it left out was that the valley's startling productivity was the result of six thousand years of deliberate management by the Kalapuya people, who had burned and cultivated the valley floor into some of the most productive land on the continent. The settlers were arriving to farm a landscape that Indigenous people had already made farmable. The Oregon Trail ended in someone else's garden.

Between eighteen forty-three and eighteen sixty, an estimated three hundred thousand emigrants traveled the Oregon Trail. It was the largest peacetime migration in American history, and it moved in waves. Eighteen forty-three was the test run. Eighteen forty-five, eighteen fifty, and eighteen fifty-two brought the largest single-year waves. Cholera along the Platte River killed tens of thousands over the years of the migration, particularly in the epidemic years of eighteen forty-nine and eighteen fifty-two.

The last stretch of the trail was the cruelest. By the time emigrants reached the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon, their animals were exhausted, their provisions depleted, and the weather was turning. Coming down the Cascades required lowering wagons down rock faces with ropes. Some families sold everything they had left and paid to ride the Columbia River on rafts, gambling against the rapids rather than the road.

The Willamette Valley was, for most who reached it, what they had been told. Good land. Mild winters. Rain instead of frost. They built farms and small towns and eventually a city. By eighteen fifty-nine, when Oregon became a state, the valley was the most densely settled region of the Pacific Northwest.

What the emigrant era did not mention, and what the state's founding document made explicit, was who was not welcome in the valley they were building. The Black exclusion clause was written into the Oregon Constitution the same year the wagon trains were still arriving. The garden was for some settlers and not for others, and the framers wrote that division into law.