steamboat or a sailboat, or a cow path, on the whole way from Independence, Missouri to Portland, Oregon, when our pioneers pulled up stakes in Missouri, Iowa and other border states and started out on a jaunt of two thousand miles. There was not an automobile or a flying machine in all the world, and only a few hundred miles of railroad.
Those bold pioneers built their own bridges and ferries, crossed deserts, scaled mountains and floated down wild streams, all out of their own resources, as they went along. The world never had before 1843, and never will have again, the likes of the old Oregon trail. The trail did not, as many people believe, follow the route of the Lewis and Clarke expedition to Oregon, thirty-eight years prior to the making of the trail. The pioneers selected the route and made their own road from day to day. No surveyor or civil engineer preceded them. No guide or map furnished them the direction. Very few of them, if any, knew why they went in one direction or another. The Platte river furnished a general course from the Missouri river to the mountains; but beyond that, there was no distinctive mark to guide them. Fifteen or twenty men preceded the caravan on every day's travel and selected the courses, removed what obstructions they could, and prepared the way to cross streams. The great lumbering caravan, with its wagons, horseback men and women, and the thousands of cattle followed, conquering and to conquer. In one sense the pioneer emigration was national and military; because it decided the title to Oregon by actual settlement. And it cost the nation nothing, but added more in power and influence than all the battle ships afloat, that cost a hundred millions.
Without organization, without preliminary efforts or solicitation, without public meetings to arouse enthusiasm, without advertised rewards, without distresses in the past or hoped for bounties in the future, and without public announcement the pioneers quietly began to gather on the west bank of the Missouri river in the last days of April. Day after day the wagons came in from various parts of Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas, while a few came up the river in the little steamboats of that early day. The travelers camped around the town of Independence and pitched their tents upon the prairie, and day by day the host increased, and all was bustle and eagerness to be on the way. Nothing now was lacking but grass.
Grass! Did you ever think of it? The Creator of the heavens and the earth, covered three-quarters of the globe with water, and the remainder with grass. It was not Spitzenberg apples, or oranges, Lambert cherries or Tokay grapes, but grass that he caused to spring up to support all living creatures; for as the scriptures truthfully declare "all flesh is grass." And so the great caravan of Oregon pioneers had to wait on the banks of the Missouri river for the grass to grow before they could turn a wheel towards the goal of all their hopes. It was the grass that must feed the teams to haul the wagons, that must feed the milk cows for support of men, women and children, and it was the grass to feed the buffalo and antelope to furnish beef and venison to feed the pioneers, on their long and toilsome journey.
The first notable emigration started for Oregon from Independence, Missouri, in 1843. A smaller company had come over the summer before. The caravan of 1843 numbered over one thousand persons, men, women and children; and about five thousand domestic animals. And the making of the Oregon trail, or at least the hunting for a practicable route by the outriders sent forward each day in advance of the train of wagons, fell to the lot of the emigration of 1843. There had been a few traders' wagons over the route as far west as Fort Hall, which was the easy part of the whole distance, but nothing west of that point in the shape of anything better than an Elk or Indian trail.
All readers of the past fifty years are familiar with the advice of the later day Benjamin Franklin—Horace Greeley—who advised all the young men to "go west and grow up with the country." But the Oregon emigration of 1843
