The emigrants of to-day do not go by the “Whoa-haw” route. On February twelfth of the year 1902, between fifteen hundred and eighteen hundred land hunters left the city of Chicago for the country of the Northwest. Two-thirds of these came from the crowded East, the remaining third, for the most part, from the crowded West of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, now grown very old.

A common carrier, responsible as such for the life and goods of these emigrants, agreed to take them from Chicago to the city of Portland, on the extreme western end of that Oregon trail, for the price per head of thirty dollars. The old “Whoa-haw” route once demanded a year of time and a heart of steel, as part of the essential capital of the traveler, and demanded also that he take his own chances and foot his own losses, which, in the nature of things, might be considerable.

It was expected by one railroad in the year 1902 that it would, within the term of twelve months, carry out fifty thousand persons to settle in the Northwest coast country. There you have the old way and the new. There you have a part of the history of a country two thousand miles west of the Mississippi valley, which even Thomas Jefferson accepted as the very farthest edge of the region that could ever be called America! This is the story of a land that even Thomas Benton, a big man, and always a friend of the West, really in his own conscience thought could never, by any possibility, extend its national and civilized limits west of the Rockies! This is the record of a region which, in the beginnings of the Oregon trail, our ablest men of letters and of statecraft thought could never be aught but the home of wandering tribes of savages! Truly the great men of to-day might profitably learn humility from a study of the things which the American people have done in spite of leaders. Ah! Daniel Webster, and many other Daniels of the little East, could you come to life to-day, what would be your oratory?

Francis Parkman, sometimes querulous, often supercilious, but ever beautiful and splendidly accurate historian of the beginnings of the American West, visited the Oregon trail in 1846, twelve years after Kit Carson had practically ceased to trap beaver, and four years after the first Frémont expedition.[[39]] He says: “Emigrants from every part of the country were preparing for the journey to Oregon and California;” and adds, “An unusual number of traders were outfitting for the Northwest;” as well as many Mormons. This was before the discovery of gold in California. Independence, the outfitting point, was at the threshold of the later West, the beginning of the way to the Pacific.[[40]]

Parkman states in the preface to a later edition of his work (1872): “We knew that a few fanatical outcasts were groping their way across the plains to seek an asylum from Gentile persecution, but we did not dream that the polygamous hordes of Mormon would rear a swarming Jerusalem in the bosom of solitude itself. We knew that, more and more, year after year, the trains of the emigrant wagons would creep in slow procession toward barbarous Oregon or wild California, but we did not dream, how Commerce and Gold would breed nations along the Pacific, the disenchanting screech of locomotives break the spell of weird mysterious mountains. . . . The wild cavalcade that defiled with me down the gorges of the Black Hills, with its paint and war plumes, fluttering trophies and savage embroidery, bows, arrows, lances and shields, will never be seen again.”

In no way could Parkman have been more just or thoughtful than in one of his chance statements. “All things are relative,” said he. “The West is either very old or very new, according as we look at it.” From the one point of view he might feel a superiority of his own, for as he traveled over the country a few days’ march west of Leavenworth he saw many antlers of elk and skulls of buffalo, “reminders of the animals once swarming over this now deserted region.” This intervening country between the Missouri River and the plains proper he considers to serve the popular notion of the “prairie.” “For this it is,” he writes, “from which tourists, painters, poets and novelists, who have seldom penetrated farther, derived their conception of the whole region.” There was fell stroke of unwitting justice! Even to-day there are artists and novelists that deal with the West, but have “seldom penetrated farther” than the edge of the real West.

Parkman himself saw the old trail fairly well dotted with the outfits of the west-bound emigrants. He describes the difficulties then existing between the Mormons and their enemies, and the suspicions of the one party against the other. He saw one party of fifty wagons, with “hundreds of cattle,” on his way up the Platte. Far out to the West, on that Horse Creek so frequently mentioned in the history of the mountain trappers’ rendezvous, he witnessed a party of Indian women and children bathing in the stream, while meantime “a long train of emigrants with their heavy wagons was crossing the creek, and dragging on in slow procession by the encampment of the people whom they and their descendants, in the space of a century, are to sweep from the face of the earth.” This was toward the headwaters of the Platte, of course, not far from that Fort Laramie where he met the grandsons of Daniel Boone, still going West, even unto the third and fourth generation. “Great changes are at hand,” says he, “great changes are at hand in all that region. With the stream of emigration to Oregon and California the buffalo will dwindle away. . . . In a few years the traveler will pass in tolerable security.” This was the utmost prophecy of one of the most intelligent and philosophical travelers that ever went from the East into the West!

Yet one of the most vivid conceptions possible of the history of that day, as bearing on the strange impulse that seemed to drive these wanderers west and ever westward, may be gained from a passage of Parkman’s “Oregon Trail.” “It is worth noticing,” says he, “that on the Platte one may sometimes see the shattered wrecks of ancient claw-footed tables, well waxed and rubbed, or massive bureaus of carved oak. These, some of them no doubt the relics of ancestral prosperity in colonial times, must have encountered strange vicissitudes. Brought, perhaps, originally from England; then, with the declining fortunes of their owners, borne across the Alleghanies to the wilderness of Ohio or Kentucky; then to Illinois or Missouri; and now at last fondly stowed away for the interminable journey to Oregon. But the stern privations of the way are little anticipated. The cherished relic is thrown out to scorch and crack on the hot prairie.” What a world of suggestion there lies in this chance picture of the desert—what a world of American history it covers! Perhaps one day the American people will come to take interest in a past so curious and so striking as its own.

There was a time when every Western man, still restless, still unsettled, still under the mysterious west-bound impulse, thought in terms of Oregon and California. No wall could have stopped these men. No political doctrine could have restrained them. As well try to regulate the sweep of the tides of ocean, equally mysterious, equally irresistible. This great road of the prairies and the mountains, more than two thousand miles long, and level, smooth and easy, even though it crossed a continental divide—this unengineered triumph of engineering—lay directly at hand as the natural pathway of the American people. It was the longest highway of the world, unless that may be the trail of the convicts of Siberia, to reach whose terminus in the fullness of time this great trail of the American freemen seems to have been devised. It was the route of a national movement—the emigration of a people “seeking to avail itself of opportunities that have come but rarely in the history of the world, and will never come again.”

As has been stated, the overland trail to Oregon began, as did the Santa Fé trail, at the town of Independence, on the Missouri River. The two trails were the same for forty-one miles, when, as the able historian of the fur trade remarks, a simple sign board was seen which carried the words, “Road to Oregon.”[[41]] The methods of these old men were very direct and simple. There was small flourish about this little board, whose mission was to point the way across these miles of wild and uninhabited country! There were branch trails that came into the road from Leavenworth and St. Joseph, striking it above the point of departure from the Santa Fé trail; but the Oregon trail proper swung off from this fork, running steadily to the northwest, part of the time along the Little Blue River, until at length it struck the valley of the Platte, which was so essential to its welfare. The distance from Independence to the Platte was three hundred and sixteen miles, the trail reaching the Platte “about twenty miles below the head of Grand Island.” The course thence lay up the Platte valley to the two fords, about at the Forks of the Platte, four hundred and thirty-three or four hundred and ninety-three miles.