Oregon Trail, also called Oregon-California Trail, in U.S. history, an overland trail between Independence, Missouri, and Oregon City, near present-day Portland, Oregon, in the Willamette River valley. It was one of the two main emigrant routes to the American West in the 19th century, the other being the southerly Santa Fe Trail from Independence to Santa Fe (now in New Mexico). In addition, branches from each main trail provided connections to destinations in California, and a spur of the northerly Oregon route, part of the Oregon Trail, led to the Great Salt Lake region of what is now northern Utah. The Oregon Trail, which stretched for about 2,000 miles (3,200 km), flourished as the main means for hundreds of thousands of emigrants to reach the Northwest from the early 1840s through the 1860s. It crossed varied and often difficult terrain that included large territories occupied by Native Americans. From Independence it first traversed the vast prairie grasslands of present-day northeastern Kansas and southern Nebraska, there following the Platte River. Skirting the southern end of the Sand Hills, it continued along the North Platte River (a major tributary of the Platte) into much drier and increasingly rugged lands in what is now southern Wyoming. There, leaving the river, it crossed its first mountain ranges before heading across the arid and desolate Great Divide Basin. In southwestern Wyoming, after having run largely westward for hundreds of miles, the route trended generally to the northwest as it traversed more mountains and then followed the relatively level plain of the Snake River in what is now southern Idaho. Entering the northeastern corner of present-day Oregon, the trail crossed the Blue Mountains before reaching the lower Columbia River. From there travelers could float downstream or, after 1846, go overland through the Cascade Range to the trail’s western terminus in the fertile Willamette valley situated between the Cascades and the Coast Ranges to the west. Fort Astoria Portions of what was to become the Oregon Trail were first used by trappers, fur traders, and missionaries (c. 1811–40) who traveled on foot and horseback. Until the trail’s development as a wagon route, however, people of European descent (whites) in eastern North America who wished to travel to California or Oregon generally went by ship around the southern tip of South America, an arduous and often harrowing sea journey that could take nearly a year to complete. Thus, before the turn of the 19th century few whites had ventured into the vast territory west of the Mississippi River that came to be included in the U.S. government’s 1802 Louisiana Purchase. One of those was the French Canadian trapper and explorer Toussaint Charbonneau. He and Shoshone wife Sacagawea were instrumental members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–06), the government’s first attempt to systematically explore, map, and report on its newly acquired lands and the Oregon country that lay beyond them. In 1810 fur entrepreneur John Jacob Astor organized an expedition of frontiersmen to head westward and establish a trading post for his American Fur Company in Oregon. The men followed the Missouri River upstream from St. Louis to Arikara Indian villages in what is now South Dakota and then struck out on the difficult trek across the plains and mountains through Wyoming and Idaho to Oregon. There they, and another group that had sailed there by ship, established in 1812 Fort Astoria (now Astoria, Oregon) near the mouth of the Columbia River, the first American-owned settlement on the Pacific Ocean coast and what the company hoped would be the major post from which Astor would conduct trade with China. Astor’s expedition, in dire need of supplies and help, sent members back east in 1812. During that journey Robert Stuart and his companions discovered the South Pass in southwestern Wyoming, a 20-mile (32-km) gap in the Rocky Mountains that offered the lowest (and easiest) crossing of the Continental Divide. (Lewis and Clark, unaware of the pass, had crossed the divide at a more treacherous spot farther to the north.) Astor’s venture foundered, however, when the British took over his post in 1813 during the War of 1812, and he sold his operation there to the North West Company (then a rival of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the dominant fur traders in the Northwest and Canada). Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now Despite Stuart’s detailed account of the Astor expedition, the South Pass remained largely ignored. In 1806 Zebulon Montgomery Pike, after exploring the Great Plains region, had famously called the West the Great American Desert, a judgment given even wider publicity by Stephen H. Long after he led an expedition to the southern Great Plains in 1819–20. For some years thereafter an American public that initially had been thrilled by the reports of Lewis and Clark became swayed against the West. Not until trappers Jedediah Smith and Thomas Fitzpatrick rediscovered the pass in 1824 did that critical route through the mountains became widely known. Trail of Tears, in U.S. history, the forced relocation during the 1830s of Eastern Woodlands Indians of the Southeast region of the United States (including Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole, among other nations) to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. Estimates based on tribal and military records suggest that approximately 100,000 indigenous people were forced from their homes during that period, which is sometimes known as the removal era, and that some 15,000 died during the journey west. The term Trail of Tears invokes the collective suffering those people experienced, although it is most commonly used in reference to the removal experiences of the Southeast Indians generally and the Cherokee nation specifically. The physical trail consisted of several overland routes and one main water route and, by passage of the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act in 2009, stretched some 5,045 miles (about 8,120 km) across portions of nine states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee). The roots of forced relocation lay in greed. The British Proclamation of 1763 designated the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River as Indian Territory. Although that region was to be protected for the exclusive use of indigenous peoples, large numbers of Euro-American land speculators and settlers soon entered. For the most part, the British and, later, U.S. governments ignored these acts of trespass.
American frontier: From Plymouth Rock to the Trail of Tears From the time of their arrival on the continent, English settlers sought territorial expansion at the expense of the Native population.... In 1829 a gold rush occurred on Cherokee land in Georgia. Vast amounts of wealth were at stake: at their peak, Georgia mines produced approximately 300 ounces of gold a day. Land speculators soon demanded that the U.S. Congress devolve to the states the control of all real property owned by tribes and their members. That position was supported by Pres. Andrew Jackson, who was himself an avid speculator. Congress complied by passing the Indian Removal Act (1830). The act entitled the president to negotiate with the eastern nations to effect their removal to tracts of land west of the Mississippi and provided some $500,000 for transportation and for compensation to native landowners. Jackson reiterated his support for the act in various messages to Congress, notably “On Indian Removal” (1830) and “A Permanent Habitation for the American Indians” (1835), which illuminated his political justifications for removal and described some of the outcomes he expected would derive from the relocation process. Movement of Native Americans after the U.S. Indian Removal Act Indigenous reactions to the Indian Removal Act varied. The Southeast Indians were for the most part tightly organized and heavily invested in agriculture. The farms of the most populous tribes—the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee—were particularly coveted by outsiders because they were located in prime agricultural areas and were very well developed. This meant that speculators who purchased such properties could immediately turn a profit: fields had already been cleared, pastures fenced, barns and houses built, and the like. Thus, the Southeast tribes approached federal negotiations with the goal of either reimbursement for or protection of their members’ investments. The Choctaw were the first polity to finalize negotiations: in 1830 they agreed to cede their real property for western land, transportation for themselves and their goods, and logistical support during and after the journey. However, the federal government had no experience in transporting large numbers of civilians, let alone their household effects, farming equipment, and livestock. Bureaucratic ineptitude and corruption caused many Choctaw to die from exposure, malnutrition, exhaustion, and disease while traveling. The Chickasaw signed an initial removal agreement as early as 1830, but negotiations were not finalized until 1832. Skeptical of federal assurances regarding reimbursement for their property, members of the Chickasaw nation sold their landholdings at a profit and financed their own transportation. As a result, their journey, which took place in 1837, had fewer problems than did those of the other Southeast tribes. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now The Creek also finalized a removal agreement in 1832. However, Euro-American settlers and speculators moved into the planned Creek cessions prematurely, causing conflicts, delays, and fraudulent land sales that delayed the Creek journey until 1836. Federal authorities once again proved incompetent and corrupt, and many Creek people died, often from the same preventable causes that had killed Choctaw travelers. A small group of Seminole leaders negotiated a removal agreement in 1832, but a majority of the tribe protested that the signatories had no authority to represent them. The United States insisted that the agreement should hold, instigating such fierce resistance to removal that the ensuing conflict became known as the Second Seminole War (1835–42). Although many were eventually captured and removed to the west, a substantial number of Seminole people managed to elude the authorities and remain in Florida. The Cherokee chose to use legal action to resist removal. Their lawsuits, notably Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), reached the U.S. Supreme Court but ultimately provided no relief. As with the Seminole, a few Cherokee leaders negotiated a removal agreement that was subsequently rejected by the people as a whole. Although several families moved west in the mid-1830s, most believed that their property rights would ultimately be respected. This was not to be the case, and in 1838 the U.S. military began to force Cherokee people from their homes, often at gunpoint. Held in miserable internment camps for days or weeks before their journeys began, many became ill, and most were very poorly equipped for the arduous trip. Those who took the river route were loaded onto boats in which they traveled parts of the Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi, and Arkansas rivers, eventually arriving at Fort Gibson in Indian Territory. Not until then did the survivors receive much-needed food and supplies. Perhaps 4,000 of the estimated 15,000 Cherokee died on the journey, while some 1,000 avoided internment and built communities in North Carolina. Karl Bodmer: Sauk and Fox Indians Traditionally, the Northeast Indian nations tended to be more mobile and less politically unified than those of the Southeast. As a result, literally dozens of band-specific removal agreements were negotiated with the peoples of that region between 1830 and 1840. Many of the groups residing in the coniferous forests of the Upper Midwest, such as various bands of Ojibwa and Ho-Chunk, agreed to cede particular tracts of land but retained in perpetuity the right to hunt, fish, and gather wild plants and timber from such properties. Groups living in the prairies and deciduous forests of the Lower Midwest, including bands of Sauk, Fox, Iowa, Illinois, and Potawatomi, ceded their land with great reluctance and were moved west in small parties, usually under pressure from speculators, settlers, and the U.S. military. A few groups attempted armed resistance, most notably a band led by the Sauk leader Black Hawk in 1832. Although their experiences are often overshadowed by those of the more-populous Southeast nations, the peoples of the Northeast constituted perhaps one-third to one-half of those who were subject to removal. In 1987 the U.S. Congress designated the Trail of Tears as a National Historic Trail in memory of those who had suffered and died during removal. As mentioned above, the original trail was more than doubled in size in 2009 to reflect the addition of several newly documented routes, as well as roundup and dispersion sites. |
Based on the information in the map above, which trail was used first?
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