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party, adopted rules concerning equipment, the route to be taken, and other details of preparation for the journey.
Organizing for the march. Independence, Missouri, had for some years been the general outfitting place for companies of traders, trappers, and emigrants going to the far West. The village lay a few miles from the Missouri River, near the present site of Kansas City, and was the radiating point for many wilderness highways, including the great Santa Fe and Oregon "trails." Most of the small parties from Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, as well as those from Missouri, gathered at this place. By the middle of May many had arrived, driving in from all directions two, three, a dozen or twenty wagons at a time, with loose stock following behind the train. They now made arrangements for the start, adopting a body of rules, and choosing a pilot to conduct them through the mountains. The pioneers were then ready to move forward.
Peter H. Burnett; the start; Elm Grove. A leading man of this emigration was Peter II. Burnett, a young lawyer from Platte County, Missouri, who had done much to get the company together. He kept a diary during the course of the journey, and on reaching the Willamette wrote a number of letters for the New York Herald, giving an account of the trip. Looking back from his far western home to the time of beginning their march from Missouri, and realizing both its difficulties and the significance of what had been done.
