If you thought that everybody went to Oregon by wagon train, boy are you wrong. If you count the people that went by ship and train together, you get more than 50,000 people, that’s insane! When people were on both wagons and ships, people threw some of their stuff that they were bringing out and just left it there. On wagons though, the people only crossed five states going northwest while the ships went all the way down to South America and up into the US, to Oregon. One of the advantages of going by ship was that you didn’t have to go through flooded rivers like wagons had to. But still, wagons were not as dirty as the ships were and when you went by wagon, you would get there way before someone that was going by ship. One disadvantage for the wagon trains though, was that people had to walk next to the wagons for miles.
If you were on the Oregon Trail, you would be doing stuff all over the place. Your schedule would be very tight. One of the main reason that people went to Oregon for was because of the rich soil that was there. For some of the people, the trail was more severe than to others, because people drank out of water holes that were contaminated, so they were contaminated and could not walk alongside the wagons. The first people to make the journey went on the year of 1841 and the last in 1869. The most weight that a wagon could carry was only about 2,500 pounds and went very slowly. In the year 1846 a man named Lansford Hastings published the book “The Emigrant’s guide to Oregon and California” wich told people how to get to these areas in an easier way. Some people relaxed on sundays and others didn’t because they wanted to get to Oregon as soon as possible. Some people starved to death when they were in the trail and many others got close to their end when they starved, but the thing that killed most of the people in the trail was the disease called Cholera. At night the people mostly circled the wagons for protection from the wild animals, though another problem was the native american tribes. The natives killed as many as 400 hundred travelers during the journey, but natural disasters also killed many people though they were mostly storms.
Before anything, people had to prepare for the 2,000 mile long journey to the west. What the wagons were mostly pulled by were oxen, even though they were very slow they were really steady. If you were going by wagon to Oregon, it would take you about 5 months to finally get to the beloved territory of Oregon. Most of the people that made the trip began in cities near the Missouri River and most people called these cities “jump-off cities” and those were the cities in which people bought all of the stuff they needed to make the trip… and also sold some of the things that they had to make the money that they needed to buy the supplies that would be useful during the trip. People made the trip first in 1841 but Oregon just became a territory in the year of 1846. If you were alive in the time of the Oregon Trail, you would have known that one of the most common types of transportation of the time was traveling by wagon and it took a long time to get from one place to another.
In 1863, Native Americans attacked and destroyed wagons in the Oregon Trail. Natives killed many people in the trail.
People traveled on the trail from the year 1841 up to the year of 1869. Marks of the Oregon Trail are still visible today through all the places that it crossed and all the wagons that carried things within them. It was a dangerous journey, though it gave people a second chance in their lives.
A wagon crashed into the mountains and the people have to walk until they find another wagon. Wagons mostly crashed going down the mountains.
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