Trifter

Image via Wikipedia

As a man who walks maybe 20 feet for his morning newspaper, he was more than a little curious to learn something of the pioneers who trekked a couple of thousand miles on the Oregon Trail, largely on shoe leather. During the 1840s, ’50s, and ’60s nearly half a million people trudged out of the shade of settled America and west across the treeless plains to Oregon, California, and Utah. They called themselves emigrants, for until about 1847 they were leaving the United States—Mexico owned California and Utah, and the British still clung to Oregon.

Image via Wikipedia

The emigrants rode wagons or horses, or pulled handcarts. A few pushed wheelbarrows. Most walked—2,000 miles to the Pacific. They were on the trail in the middle of nowhere as long as six months and suffered appallingly. Many turned around and went home. There were a thousand ways to be maimed, fall ill, or die—cholera, gunshots (usually accident), drowning, an occasional arrow, stampedes, wagon wheels. Absolom Harden paused somewhere on the prairie on his way to Oregon in 1847 and wrote in his diary: ”Mr. Harveys young little boy Richard 8 years old went to git in the waggon and fel from the tung . . . the wheals run over him and mashed his head and Kil him ston dead he never moved.”

Almost overnight the survivors transformed the United States from half a country into half a continent. Well before 1869, when the transcontinental railroad was completed, the trail migration had peaked. Rarely in history had so many people picked up and gone so far over so vast a wilderness.

Image via Wikipedia

Hollywood later distorted this epic with cellos and French horns, and by the time he got there, the trail had its filling stations and motels with coin-operated vibrating beds. Last year on Memorial Day he was driving up the Platte River Valley in Nebraska—the main overland corridor—fiddling with the radio. It had one of those ‘’seek” buttons that automatically seeks out every person within a thousand miles who sings through his nose. Eventually it landed on a broadcast of the Indianapolis 500. There he was on the Oregon Trail in an air-conditioned rent-a-car listening to a bunch of men in fireproof jumpsuits whang around a racetrack fast enough to cover a quarter of the Oregon Trail in a few hours. He drove into a motel.

(to be continued on Part 3).