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The Oregon Trail was a 2,170-mile (3,490 km) east–west, large-wheeled wagon route and emigrant trail in the United States that connected the Missouri River to valleys in Oregon Territory. The eastern part of the Oregon Trail crossed what is now the states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming. The western half crossed the current states of Idaho and Oregon.
The Great Northern Railway was an American Class I railroad. Running from Saint Paul, Minnesota, to Seattle, Washington, it was the creation of 19th-century railroad entrepreneur James J. Hill and was developed from the Saint Paul & Pacific Railroad. The Great Northern's route was the northernmost transcontinental railroad route in the U.S.
Jedediah Strong Smith was an American clerk, transcontinental pioneer, frontiersman, hunter, trapper, author, cartographer, mountain man and explorer of the Rocky Mountains, the Western United States, and the Southwest during the early 19th century. After 75 years of obscurity following his death, Smith was rediscovered as the American whose explorations led to the use of the 20-mile (32 km)-wide South Pass as the dominant route across the Continental Divide for pioneers on the Oregon Trail.
The Western United States is one of the four census regions defined by the United States Census Bureau.
A mountain man is an explorer who lives in the wilderness and makes his living from hunting and trapping. Mountain men were most common in the North American Rocky Mountains from about 1810 through to the 1880s. They were instrumental in opening up the various emigrant trails allowing Americans in the east to settle the new territories of the far west by organized wagon trains traveling over roads explored and in many cases, physically improved by the mountain men and the big fur companies, originally to serve the mule train-based inland fur trade.
Oregon Country was a large region of the Pacific Northwest of North America that was subject to a long dispute between the United Kingdom and the United States in the early 19th century.
The Oregon missionaries were pioneers who settled in the Oregon Country of North America starting in the 1830s dedicated to bringing Christianity to local Native Americans. There had been missionary efforts prior to this, such as those sponsored by the Northwest Company with missionaries from the Church of England starting in 1819. The Foreign Mission movement was already 15 years underway by 1820, but it was difficult to find missionaries willing to go to Oregon, as many wanted to go to the east, to India or China. It was not until the 1830s, when a schoolmaster from Connecticut, Hall Jackson Kelley, created his "American Society for the Settlement of the Oregon Country," that more interest and support for Oregon missionaries grew. Around the same time, four Nez Perce arrived in St. Louis in the fall of 1831, with accounts differencing as to if these travelers were asking for "the book of life", an idea used by Protestant missionaries, or if they asked for "Blackrobes", meaning Jesuits, thus Catholic missionaries. Either way this inspired Christian missionaries to travel to the Oregon Territory. Oregon missionaries played a political role, as well as a religious one, as their missions established US political power in an area in which the Hudson's Bay Company, operating under the British government, maintained a political interest in the Oregon country. Such missionaries had an influential impact on the early settlement of the region, establishing institutions that became the foundation of United States settlement of the Pacific Northwest.
South Pass is a route across the Continental Divide, in the Rocky Mountains in southwestern Wyoming. It lies in a broad high region, 35 miles (56 km) wide, between the nearly 14,000 ft (4,300 m) Wind River Range to the north and the over 8,500 ft (2,600 m) Oregon Buttes and arid, saline near-impassable Great Divide Basin to the south. The Pass lies in southwestern Fremont County, approximately 35 miles (56 km) SSW of Lander.
Randolph Barnes Marcy was an officer in the United States Army, chiefly noted for his frontier guidebook, the Prairie Traveler (1859), based on his own extensive experience of pioneering in the west. This publication became a key handbook for the thousands of Americans wanting to cross the continent. In the Civil War, Marcy became chief of staff to his son-in-law George B. McClellan, and was later appointed Inspector General of the U.S. Army.
General Joel Palmer was an American pioneer of the Oregon Territory in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. He was born in Upper Canada, and spent his early years in New York and Pennsylvania before serving as a member of the Indiana House of Representatives.
Jesse Applegate was an American pioneer who led a large group of settlers along the Oregon Trail to the Oregon Country. He was an influential member of the early government of Oregon, and helped establish the Applegate Trail as an alternative route to the Oregon Trail.
George Gibbs (1815–1873) was an American ethnologist, naturalist and geologist who contributed to the study of the languages of indigenous peoples in Washington Territory. Known for his expertise in Native American customs and languages, Gibbs participated in numerous treaty negotiations between the U.S. government and the native tribes.
Robert Stuart was a Scottish-born, Canadian and American fur trader, best known as a member of the first European-American party to cross South Pass during an overland expedition from Fort Astoria to Saint Louis in 1811. He was a member of the North West Company (NWC) until recruited by John Jacob Astor to develop the new Pacific Fur Company, which was based at Fort Astoria, on the coast of present-day Oregon. Astor intended the venture to develop a continent-wide commercial empire in fur trading.
The history of Oregon, a U.S. state, may be considered in five eras: geologic history, inhabitation by native peoples, early exploration by Europeans, settlement by pioneers, and modern development.
The Provisional Government of Oregon was a popularly elected settler government created in the Oregon Country (1818-1846), in the Pacific Northwest region of the western portion of the continent of North America. Its formation had been advanced at the Champoeg Meetings since February 17, 1841, and it existed from May 2, 1843 until March 3, 1849, and provided a legal system and a common defense amongst the mostly American pioneers settling an area then inhabited by the many Indigenous Nations. Much of the region's geography and many of the Natives were not known by people of European descent until several exploratory tours and expeditions were authorized at the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries, such as Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery going northwest in 1804-1806, and United States Army Lt. Zebulon Pike and his party first journeying north, then later to the far southwest.
In the history of the American frontier, pioneers built overland trails throughout the 19th century, especially between 1840 and 1847 as an alternative to sea and railroad transport. These immigrants began to settle much of North America west of the Great Plains as part of the mass overland migrations of the mid-19th century. Settlers emigrating from the eastern United States did so with various motives, among them religious persecution and economic incentives, to move from their homes to destinations further west via routes such as the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails. After the end of the Mexican–American War in 1849, vast new American conquests again encouraged mass immigration. Legislation like the Donation Land Claim Act and significant events like the California Gold Rush further encouraged settlers to travel overland to the west.
John Miller Drake was a Union Army officer in the 1st Oregon Cavalry and the 1st Oregon Infantry regiments during the American Civil War. He eventually reached the rank of lieutenant colonel. He led one of the first campaigns to respond to the threat Chief Paulina posed to settlers and rival Indians in central Oregon. Later he was a purchasing agent for the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company.
George Byron Currey was a pioneer, lawyer, soldier, farmer, and editor in the U.S. state of Oregon. A native of Indiana, he served as an officer in the 1st Oregon Volunteer Cavalry Regiment and then the 1st Oregon Volunteer Infantry Regiment], before being appointed commander of the District of the Columbia at the end of the American Civil War as well as in the Snake War in 1865.
The following published works deal with the cultural, political, economic, military, biographical and geologic history of pre-territorial Oregon, Oregon Territory and the State of Oregon.
The Fort Walla Walla–Fort Colville Military Road was built in June 1859 to connect the Walla Walla area with its fairly easy access to the Columbia River to the mountainous area of the Huckleberry and Selkirk Mountains of current Northeast Washington and the Inland Northwest. Brigadier General William S. Harney, commander of the Department of Oregon, opened up the district north of the Snake River to settlers in 1858 and ordered Brevet Major Pinkney Lugenbeel, 9th Infantry Regiment to establish a U.S. Army post to restrain the Indians perceived as hostile to the U.S. Army's Northwest Division and to protect miners who traveled to the area after first reports of gold in the area appeared in Western Washington newspapers in July 1855.
References
- 1 2 3 Johnson, Overton (28 January 2018). Route across the Rocky mountains. Narratives of the trans-Mississippi frontier. Princeton. hdl:2027/mdp.39015064375572.
- ↑ Smith, Charles W. (July 1932). "Route Across the Rocky Mountains. By Overton Johnson and William H. Winter". Washington Historical Quarterly. 23 (3): 230–231. Archived from the original on 2018-01-29. Retrieved 2016-10-27– via journals.lib.washington.edu.
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