Myths that rode west

At least two notions have become attached to the Oregon Trail, the main route for pioneers crossing the frontier between the 1840s and the 1860s, and both are debunked in David Dary’s compelling account of the first great road west.

It was no mere trail. From its discovery in the early 1800s until the coming of the railroad in 1869, it would carry more than a quarter-million men, women and children to new homes. Nor did it take them to Oregon alone: “The Oregon Trail,” writes Dary, “should be called the Oregon-California-Utah-Colorado-Nevada-Montana-and-Other-Points-West Trail.”

The trail was blazed in 1812 by a man on his way from Oregon to New York City. After helping to found the trading post called Astoria, near the mouth of the Columbia River, Robert Stuart headed East to report to the man for whom the post was named, John Jacob Astor. Dary uses Stuart’s journal to describe that first journey along a route that would bring so many hopeful Americans in the other direction.

“Last night we made a hearty meal on the Dog’s carcass,” goes one journal entry, “and between the evening’s and this morning’s pastime, caught a sufficiency of Trout for breakfast, which we found delicious, they being fried with the dogs’ fat and a little flour we had still preserved.” Much of the drama and pathos in “The Oregon Trail” arises from the encounters, sometimes hostile and sometimes friendly, between the pioneers and the Indians already living along the route. These emigrants also can be seen as invaders and conquerors rather than discoverers: “Before the first Europeans arrived,” Dary writes, “people had lived in Oregon for more than 10,000 years.” In fact, Stuart and other early travelers on the Oregon Trail were shown the way through the wilderness by the Indians.

The Indians may not have known what they had wrought, but the future was plain to the westward-bound boomers who believed that all of North America was their patrimony. When Robert Stuart and his companions reached the frontier town of St. Louis in 1813, the editor of the Missouri Gazette wrote, “[A] journey to the Western sea will not be considered (within a few years) of much greater importance than a trip to New York.”

By 1830, 10 mule-drawn wagons and a couple of carriages became the first wheeled vehicles to use a portion of the Oregon Trail. The earliest travelers were fur trappers and missionaries. The first white women to cross the continent, according to Dary, were Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding, wives of a pair of preachers. They were soon followed by far greater numbers of emigrants. The first wagons reached the western end of the Oregon Trail in 1840.

“You have broken the ice,” said a missionary who welcomed the pioneers to the Walla Walla Valley, “and in a few years the valley will be full of our people.”

The western migration owed an important debt to popular culture. Dary writes of one intrepid trapper who sold his life story to Washington Irving in 1836 for $1,000 and whose adventures were soon advertised in Irving’s “The Adventures of Captain Bonneville.” Others learned the profit-making potential of the travel memoir and the lecture circuit, and long before the discovery of gold in California, the Golden State was drawing hopeful emigrants from the rest of the United States. As early as 1841, a point on the Oregon Trail southwest of Soda Springs in what is now Idaho became the turnoff to California.

Dary makes a plausible case that the saga of the Oregon trail begins in 1271, when 17-year-old Marco Polo embarked on his famous and fateful journey to China -- a journey that later inspired Christopher Columbus to set sail for the Orient and thus led to the accidental “discovery” of North America. And he sets the flesh-and-blood human figures who actually trod the trail -- some heroic, some tragic, some pitiable, some contemptible -- against a detailed backdrop of war, diplomacy and politics.

What makes this book so readable and rewarding, however, is Dary’s eye for color and detail: ox commands (“Gee” meant “go right,” and “Haw” meant “go left”); the terrifying spectacle of a buffalo stampede, sometimes used as a weapon by Indians against the intruding white travelers; and the ideal caliber of the weaponry one should carry on the trail. Consider these words in the darkly ironic advertisement George Donner placed in an Illinois newspaper in 1846 to recruit a few young men to accompany him on his fateful journey on the Oregon Trail: “Who Wants to Go to California Without Costing Them Anything?” *