Surviving the Oregon Trail by Rebecca Stefoff

Author:Rebecca Stefoff [Stefoff, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4645-0469-3
Publisher: Enslow Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Historians estimate that anywhere between ten thousand and thirty thousand people died along the Oregon Trail. These victims were remembered with monuments, but most were buried in unmarked graves.

One 1846 emigrant’s journal recorded such a tragedy:

Made an early start from the spring … but was stopped by an awful calamity. Mr. Collins’s son George, about 6 years old, fell from the wagon and the wheels ran over his head, killing him instantly; the remainder of the day occupied in burying him.1

Ten-year-old Catherine Sager survived a fall from her wagon—although her left leg was crushed under the wagon’s wheel. Sadly, Catherine’s father was later killed by stampeding buffalo, and her mother fell sick and died.

Every wagon train had its share of deaths and funerals. In most places, wood was too scarce for the emigrants to build coffins. Instead, the travelers wrapped their dead in canvas, buried them, and piled rocks on the graves to keep animals from digging up the bodies. Sometimes the dead were buried in the trail itself, so the oxen and wagons would pack the earth firmly over the graves. Soon the sides of the trail were lined with grave markers, each one a simple monument to loss and sorrow. One morning while Francis Parkman was riding the trail, he saw a piece of wood standing upright on a small hill. He rode up the hill and found that these words had been burned into the board with a red-hot iron:

MARY ELLIS

DIED MAY 7TH, 1845

AGED TWO MONTHS2

Almost every letter or diary written by an emigrant tells of similar sights. Historians believe that at least 10 percent of all the emigrants died and were buried along the Oregon Trail.

But the trail had its bright side. Death may have stalked the emigrants, but they enjoyed life whenever they could. Especially during the early days, when travel across the prairies was uneventful and everyone felt strong, the trip sometimes felt like one long, joyous camping trip. In the evenings, the emigrants parked their wagons in a circle and ate their suppers. Sometimes they told stories, sang, and danced around their campfires. Anyone who had a fiddle or a harmonica was begged for a tune. People who had brought books offered to read them aloud. Children played hide-and-seek or tag among the wagons.

Fellowship and friendship helped ease the difficulties of the journey for many of the emigrants. Some of the friendships born on the trail lasted a lifetime. Often families that met in the wagon trains decided to settle near each other in the new territories. Young men and women met on the trail, flirted, courted—and perhaps were married, if there was a minister in the wagon train. Boys and girls who missed the friends they had left behind at home made new friends on the trail, for almost every wagon train had plenty of children. One emigrant who had made the crossing at the age of eight later remembered the journey as fun, saying, “We just had the time of our lives.

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