Story of the Oregon Trail takes some new turns : Images of rugged pioneers have changed to portraits of restless exploiters of the land.

It’s time to reflect on the roots of our rootlessness.

The Oregon Trail is 150 years old this spring.

Two thousand miles long, passing through six states and across any number of American Indian nations, from prairie camps in Independence, Mo., westward over tough, dusty, dangerous, river-strewn countryside to Oregon City, now a Portland suburb, the Oregon Trail was the first great highway to contemporary California.

Historians figure 300,000 men, women and children migrated over the trail from 1843 through the 1850s--50,000 of them bound for Oregon, 50,000 for Utah and 200,000 for California. As dangerous and long as the trail was, it was more hospitable than more direct routes to California, such as through the Donner Pass.

Those who took the trail were the self-selecting brood stock of the restless, and with their journey they changed everything, except perhaps themselves.

“Our inheritance is not that these pioneers came and adjusted to a new place. Our inheritance is that they came and made the new place fit themselves,” said Jim Renner, a cultural historian and interpretive director of the Oregon Trail Coordinating Council in Portland.

If anniversaries are a time of reassessment as well as celebration, the sesquicentennial of the Oregon Trail is a ripe moment.

In a mere five generations, those who followed the predominantly Midwestern pioneers of the Oregon Trail and all those displaced by them face an eerie cyclical re-emergence of the conditions that led to the original transplantations: dirty, polluted and unsafe living conditions and widespread economic hardship.

The difference, of course, is that today’s pioneer descendants have no unsettled space to the West to covet; no free land beckons.

Some Westerners today feel the “push” to move on just like their ancestors, but they will never enjoy the same “pull” to go West.

Fifty years ago, for the 100th anniversary of the trail, the pioneers were celebrated for their courage in facing wild Indians and untamed wilderness. Hundreds died on the trail, thousands suffered. Their purpose was noble, their stories were told in heroic prose, their images cast in bronze likenesses.

Today, the anniversary mood is pensive. Many of the lands traversed by the pioneers, we now acknowledge, were not wilderness at all, but had been inhabited for 10,000 years. And the caricature of wild Indians has been replaced by guilt, anger and reflection about one culture’s regard for another.

“There used to be a stained-glass image of the pioneers,” said Stephen Dow Beckham, history professor and author at Lewis and Clark College in Portland.

“But really, the pioneers were the first land speculators. . . . They brought a rampant and expectant exploitation of nature’s resources. Here we are 150 years later, and the salmon are going extinct, timber is in short supply. The resources we thought were infinite proved to be quite finite in the passage of this short time.”

This new and deglamorized view of pioneers suggests a reassessment not of their dramatic drives West, but of their busy determination to reshape the West in their own image.

Beckham said: “They were an imperfect people. Rather than innovative, they really were imitative. They re-created as fast as they could the architecture, the institutions, the governments of the place they left. . . . We tend to view them as independent people, but in truth they were very dependent on the federal government and the pork barrel.”

That characteristic, like itchy feet, persists in the West today, many believe. At the start of the 21st Century, Westerners tend to stand tall in front of the mirror and behold their rugged independence, all the while enjoying the cheap resources of the government property grants, the hydroelectric-power dams of the Bureau of Reclamation and the right to consume public lands for private gain.

No matter what the mood of history, it’s one thing to reflect on the trail, its people and their legacy, another to see it and walk their footsteps and recall their travail. And that’s part of an anniversary too.

Wagon ruts of the 1840s and 1850s remain etched in the earth to this day. Federal surveyors estimate 15% of the original trail still exists in one trace form or another. Particularly in the arid stretches of the far West, the ruts can be dramatic, sometimes waist deep. In other places, the paths of the wagons cut across subdivisions in between modern houses.

Then as now, whenever a person meets up with the trail one question overrides others.

Why go?

The pioneer lore answers, in the echoing voice of one trail hand: “Just to get where I ain’t.”

From the Pens of the Pioneers

The pioneers of the Oregon Trail kept diaries on their historic journeys. About 600 of these records of passage still exist--simple, descriptive narratives without emblishment. At Portland’s Lewis and Clark College, Stephen Dow Beckham has studied these diaries and published a collection of excerpts. A sampler:

STOICISM

We encamped near the Bear River and find good grass; The mosquitoes are troublesome in the extreme; passed four graves.

--Abigail Scott, Wyoming, 1852

INDIANS

In the afternoon we came to a creek that appeared to be deep and bad to cross. Just as we were beginning to examine for a safe place to ford it, three Indians on horseback came toward us. They rode across the creek before us, apparently to show us the best way. We crossed without difficulty, and they afterwards accompanied us to where we encamped for the night.

--Margaret Frink, Idaho, 1850

EARLY GRAFFITI

Two miles brought us to the great renown Independence Rock...Thousands of names are upon it, some painted well, others tarred, and many cut in the rock.

--Vincent Geiger, Wyoming, 1849

THE GOOD AND THE BAD

Our tent is now pitched on the beautiful Platte River ...The cholera is raging. A great many deaths; graves everywhere. We as a company are all in good health. Game is scarce; a few antelope in sight. Roads bad.

--Sallie Hester, Nebraska, 1849

EVENING FUN

After dark we took a little recreation on a sand beach, in the shape of a dance, having two good violin players with their instruments. But that part of the company which is generally most interesting on such occasions, happened to be absent from our party, vis: the ladies . . . We have several bright-eyed girls along but we deemed it rather unnecessary to invite them to participate in our rough exercise of kicking sand.

--James Nesmith, Wyoming, 1843

MEDITATION

The way of the world changes all the time in spite of reason.

--Agnes Stewart Warner, Platte River, 1853

DEATH OF HIS WIFE

Twas midnight and he sat alone/The husband of the dead. That day the dark dust had been thrown/Upon her buried head. Her orphan children round me sleep/But in their sleep do moan. Now bitter tears are falling fast/I feel that I’m alone.

--John Tucker Scott, Oregon, 1853