Along this great trail crossing the waters men bent their steps toward Oregon and California, men from the banks of the Missouri, from Illinois, and now even from far-off New England—where at last they had learned the “easy way West” and had begun to travel, as their friends to the southward had been doing for so many years. Thus, then, began the great Oregon trail, this road that might, with justice, have been called an open highway when Frémont “explored” the Rockies, albeit a highway almost unsettled, as it is to-day over much of its length, though peopled thick with mighty memories. The Mormons, the Missourians, the men bound for the placers of Montana, the valleys of California, or the warm slopes of the Oregon ranges—all these helped wear deep into the earth the old roadway, once clear-cut and unmistakable for more than two thousand miles west of that Missouri River which was the first route out into the ulterior West.
It may profit us to fix in sequence a few simple facts in the study of the development of this great trail. At the start, of course, we come to our Frenchman De la Verendrye, who may perhaps have been the first to tread a portion of the later Oregon trail; since we know he forsook the Missouri and started overland, possibly up the Platte, crossing some of the country which the Astorians later saw. We hear also of the trapper Ezekiel Williams[[36]] in 1807, and some of the advance guards of the Missouri Fur Company, who were cutting loose from the Missouri River, and who were naturally looking for the easiest land routes. Then came Wilson Price Hunt, with his overland Astorians, seeking a way from the mid-Missouri River to the Columbia River.
These established the course of the Oregon trail west of the Rockies, but did not trace it so distinctly on the east of that range. Later Robert Stuart and the returning Astorians were to mark out, east of the Divide, the route of the Oregon trail for much of its length. Then came Ashley, who went up the Platte and across the South Pass; and after Ashley came scores of other flap-hatted trappers and traders, all of whom rode, we may be sure, along the easiest ways; which meant the Sweetwater and the South Pass after the Platte was left behind. These followed the route of the Oregon trail for the compelling reason of topography. Now came Bonneville and his wagons to deepen the trail, in 1832; and two years later than that, in 1834, Robert Campbell and William Sublette built old Fort Laramie, on Laramie Creek, a branch of the Platte.[[37]] This establishment went far toward developing the Oregon trail into a regular route. It became a well known trading center, so that all the trappers and many Indians rounded up there; and in the days of the emigrants, soon to come, thousands of weary travelers aided in marking deeply the now unmistakable and open roadway that lay across the Rockies.
So practicable was this post of Fort Laramie, and so practicable also the route on which it was located, that in 1849 the United States government bought the old post, and used it as a military establishment, so adding to its long and exciting history. Eight years after the building of Fort Laramie, Fort Bridger was built by Jim Bridger, on a branch of the Green River, over the Divide, farther out to the west, along what had now come to be a universally accepted highway.
Jim Bridger, possibly the first discoverer of Great Salt Lake, was, by the year 1842, ready to admit that the old days were over and done with. No more trapping for Jim Bridger. The West was gone. He must thenceforth feed Mormons, or guide government officers in their “explorations.” Bridger gave up the West as a squeezed orange at just the time Frémont was starting out to make his name as the “Pathfinder” of the Rockies. Frémont, and all the other explorers of so late a period, went west as far as the head waters of the Green River over the Oregon trail,—a road a man could have followed in the dark.
The Mormons took over Fort Bridger in 1853, not liking so stable a Gentile institution thus near to their realm; but the Mormons forgot that they could not wipe out the trail that led to Bridger’s old log fortress. The trail brought on an ever-growing stream of travel. In time Fort Bridger, too, became an army post, and remained such from 1857 till 1890. Since the latter date it has been abandoned. We go to Europe to seek for interesting ruins, forgetting Laramie and Bridger and Benton, all spots with significant and thrilling histories.
As to the great trail of the Northwest, considered as a transcontinental trail properly so called, its second stage might be said to begin in 1834,[[38]] when it was first used as a route straight through to Oregon. After that date the parties of emigrants steadily grew in numbers, among them not only men from Missouri, but farther to the east.
In 1836 there occurred a great and wonderful thing. Two women moved out into the West along the Oregon trail. We keep record of the times when wagons first went up the Platte, and we shall do well also to note this date of 1836, when women of the white race first went over the national road of the West. These two were the wives of Whitman and Spalding, missionaries bound for Oregon. Father de Smet, great man and good, a missionary also, followed in 1840; then more missionaries from New England—always prolific of missionaries; and two years later Frémont, as far at least as the South Pass. Then came the Mormons in 1847, bound for their kingdom of Deseret, and the Oregon Battalion in the same year; these followed soon thereafter by a continuous stream made up of thousands of trappers and explorers and visitors and gold seekers, who began to crowd West after ’49 and the discovery of gold. Those were busy times in the West, we may be sure. The Oregon trail grew deep and wide. No traveler on the north and south line could cross it without being aware of that fact. It was the plain, main-traveled road.
The first agricultural invasion along the old trail might be said to be that of the Mormons, who sent delegations from their settlements to occupy the Green River valley, and who used the trail for a short way. General Albert Sidney Johnston used it for many more miles, when he went out to take care of some of these Mormons, now grown obstreperous.
Even so late as this we are many years in advance of the railways; which indeed do not even to-day occupy the old Oregon trail throughout its entire length, though using much of it on both sides of that easy South Pass country, once so useful to the trappers and wagon travelers, but not so essential to railway engineers looking for more direct lines across the wastes. Perhaps we shall some day see a line of rails follow throughout the two thousand miles of this ancient trail. Even so, our American tourists would still go to Europe in search of ruins and history and memories! We know and care all too little now for this old trail, whose earliest travelers were called by the California Indians the “Whoa-haws”—that being the word most used by the aforesaid emigrants, who had pushed their ox-teams across half a continent. Significant term, this “Whoa-haw” title, though we have now forgotten it.