The Oregon Trail and the American West

Lesson 1

1846: a young Bostonian heads west

“Last spring, 1846, was a busy season in the City of St. Louis.” So begins one of the great American travel books, written by a young man who should probably have stayed home. Francis Parkman was twenty three, a Boston Brahmin from one of the city's wealthiest families, freshly out of Harvard, and plagued by fragile health: weak eyes, a nervous digestion, and spells of exhaustion that would dog him all his life. What he wanted, more than rest or a safe career in law, was the frontier. Since boyhood he had dreamed of writing the history of the old French and Indian wars, and he was convinced he had to see the wilderness and its peoples himself, while both still existed, before he could write a word of it.

So in the spring of 1846 he headed west with his cousin and traveling companion, Quincy Adams Shaw. In St. Louis they joined the stream of emigrants fitting out for Oregon and California, but the two young Bostonians were not emigrants. They carried no household goods and sought no land. Parkman was an observer on a research trip, riding out to study the Plains peoples, hunt buffalo, and test himself against a country that was already vanishing. His guide was Henry Chatillon, a seasoned French Canadian hunter of the fur trade, a man so capable and courteous that Parkman, not generous with praise, admired him without reserve.

The timing gave his private adventure a historic backdrop. In 1846 the United States stood at a hinge: war with Mexico was beginning that spring, the Oregon Country was still jointly claimed with Britain, and thousands of families were rolling west on the emigrant road. Parkman rode straight into that hinge moment, notebook in hand. What he wrote, first in magazine installments and then as this book in 1849, became the most vivid firsthand portrait we have of the trail at its flood tide, seen by a writer who could barely believe his own eyes.

Lesson 2

Outfitting and the jumping-off towns

Every westward journey began in a handful of Missouri river towns, above all Independence and Westport, which trail language called the jumping off places: the last settlements before the plains. Parkman's opening chapters are a market scene rendered in prose. Emigrants from every part of the country crowded the muddy streets, buying the tools of a two thousand mile migration: stout farm wagons, yokes of oxen, flour, bacon, coffee, rifles, and tents. Traders bound for Santa Fe and the mountain forts loaded their own heavier wagons alongside. Everybody was spending, arguing, repairing, and second guessing, because a mistake bought here would be paid for out on the prairie, where there were no shops.

The decisions were genuinely hard, and trail history is full of their consequences. Oxen were slower than mules but cheaper, hardier, and less likely to be stolen; they could also live off prairie grass. Wagons packed past two thousand pounds broke down or exhausted their teams, and the trail west would soon be littered with furniture, stoves, and books abandoned by families who had loaded their whole lives. Emigrant companies formed on the spot, elected captains, wrote constitutions, quarreled, and split, a crash course in self government conducted by amateurs in a hurry.

Parkman and Shaw traveled in a different style, and it is worth seeing clearly. They were gentlemen sportsmen: a light cart, saddle horses, mules for the baggage, a professional hunter to feed them, and a muleteer to cook. When things went wrong they could buy their way out, and at journey's end a steamboat would carry them home to Boston fortunes. The emigrant families around them were risking everything they owned on one throw. Parkman sometimes writes about them with amusement, even condescension, and a modern reader should notice the class gap behind his pen. He was a tourist among pilgrims, and his book is sharper when we remember it.

Lesson 3

Life on the prairie

West of the settlements, the emigrant road settled into its long rhythm along the rivers: up the Kansas, across to the Little Blue, then down to the broad Platte, whose valley served as the highway across Nebraska. Parkman's genius shows in how he renders the prairie itself. To a New Englander raised among forests and fences, this grass ocean was unsettling: no landmarks, no shade, a horizon that fled as fast as you rode, and a wind that never entirely stopped. Days repeated like verses of the same song. Roll at dawn, yoke the oxen, walk beside the wagons, nooning by a creek, camp at dusk in a circle of wagons, cook over fires of dried buffalo dung where wood ran out.

Yet the monotony kept breaking into event. Thunderstorms of a violence unknown back east rolled across the open sky. Emigrant trains overtook and passed one another, swapping news and gossip. Graves began to appear beside the road, some marked with a name scratched on a board, the toll of accident, drowning at river crossings, and sickness. Buffalo sign thickened as the trains moved west, then the herds themselves. Parkman, escaping Shaw's slower party whenever he could, rode out hunting with Chatillon, and the sportsman's joy of those rides fills some of the happiest pages of the book.

All of it he recorded while half broken in health. A violent attack of dysentery, his own flat summary being that such an attack on the prairie is too serious for a joke, left him for weeks able to do little but lounge in camp or stagger a few steps, living mostly on meat without salt. His eyes, already weak, ached in the glare. He kept his journal anyway, lying in a tent or propped against a wagon wheel, and the discipline shows. The Oregon Trail reads fresh because it was written down hot, by a young man determined that illness would not get the last word on his one great journey.

Lesson 4

The Plains peoples Parkman met, and what his account leaves out

The heart of Parkman's journey, and the reason he came, was the weeks he spent with an Oglala Lakota village, moving with it on the summer hunt. He is candid about his purpose: “I had come into the country almost exclusively with a view of observing the Indian character.” Few white writers of his decade got what he got: a long, close look from inside. He records lodge life, councils, feasts, horse raids, mourning customs, and the great communal buffalo hunts in granular detail, names the men he rode with, and admits his own fears, blunders, and dependence on his hosts. As a record of Plains life in 1846, his chapters remain valuable to historians and to Lakota readers alike.

Now the honesty this lesson exists for. Parkman wrote as a Boston gentleman of 1849, and his account carries his time and class in every chapter. He habitually calls Native people savages, measures their customs against Boston drawing rooms, and often cannot see past his own contempt to the intelligence in front of him, even when the same pages show Oglala hunters, diplomats, and parents outperforming him at nearly everything the prairie required. He also assumed, as most white Americans did, that Native peoples were fated to vanish before white settlement, and he treated that supposed fate as nature rather than as a policy being chosen, treaty by treaty and war by war, by his own country.

What his account leaves out matters most. The prairie he crossed as an adventure playground was somebody's homeland: hunted, named, fought over, and governed by nations with laws, trade networks, and diplomacy older than the United States. The Oglala were not scenery in his story; they were hosts managing a difficult season in a world already being squeezed by the emigrant road cutting through their hunting grounds and the diseases and trade goods arriving along it. Read Parkman, then, as a gifted witness wearing tinted glasses: trust his eyes for what a hunt looked like, question his judgments about what it meant, and remember that the peoples he met have their own histories of 1846, told from the other side of the campfire.

Lesson 5

Buffalo, weather, and hardship

Stand in the middle of Parkman's prairie and one animal fills the world. The buffalo, the American bison, fed, clothed, and housed the Plains peoples, supplied the emigrant trains with fresh meat, and gave the young sportsman his supreme thrill. His hunt chapters still raise a reader's pulse: a herd blackening the hills, the charge on horseback at full gallop, the chosen cow, the pistol work at arm's length. He can be writing of an empty morning when, as he puts it, “a great multitude of buffalo had suddenly thronged upon it,” and suddenly the prairie is a dark column stretching to both horizons. The herds he rode through numbered, across the plains, in the tens of millions.

Set against the buffalo's abundance was the country's power to punish. Parkman records storms that flattened tents and stampeded stock, hail, drenching river crossings, burning sun, and waterless stretches the emigrants feared. Disease was the quieter killer: his own dysentery wrecked the middle of his journey, and along the road the graves of emigrants who died of sickness and accident formed a dotted line west. Buffalo could also kill, as could a fall from a horse or a rifle mishandled in the dark. The trail romance of later books rests on this real foundation: the crossing was a genuine feat of endurance, performed by ordinary families with children in the wagons.

And now the fact that shadows every happy hunt in this book. Within a single generation of Parkman's ride, the herds were destroyed. Hide hunters working from the new railroads killed millions for leather and left the carcasses to rot; army officers encouraged the slaughter because destroying the buffalo meant breaking the Plains peoples' ability to live free. By the mid 1880s a species that had numbered in the tens of millions was down to a few hundred wild survivors. Parkman did not live to be innocent in this story (he was one of thousands who hunted for sport), but his pages preserve the before picture: a sea of animals whose disappearance remains one of the great ecological crimes of the century.

Lesson 6

The Rockies

Every emigrant mile led to a wall on the horizon. The road's first great landmark of the high country was Fort Laramie, in 1846 still a fur trade post at the forks of the Laramie and North Platte, where emigrants rested, repaired wagons, traded for fresh animals, and read letters and warnings left by those ahead. Parkman lingered there, collecting the society of the frontier in one yard: traders, trappers, emigrants, soldiers of fortune, and Lakota visitors. Beyond the fort his route turned south and west into the broken country of the Black Hills of Wyoming (not the famous Dakota hills of the same name), where the hunting turned hard, game scattered, and his party ate its way down to mule meat and worse.

An honest geography note belongs here, because the book's famous title promises more than Parkman rode. He never crossed the Rockies by South Pass with the emigrants, never saw Oregon, and never followed the trail past Fort Laramie on its main line. Instead his party turned south along the Front Range of Colorado, visiting the little trading settlement of Pueblo and Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, then floated and rode home down the Arkansas River in the autumn. His “Rocky Mountains” are the Front Range foothills and the Laramie country: real mountains, gloriously described at the moment their snows and pines first break the plains traveler's long grass horizon, but the eastern porch of the Rockies, not the far side.

What he gives us instead of the full crossing is the mountain world as the fur trade knew it: the trappers and mountain men in their last great decade, before beaver hats went out of fashion and the trade collapsed. He portrays their camps, boasts, feuds, and unmatched woodcraft with the same mix of fascination and Boston reserve he brought to the Oglala. By the time his party turned for home, the summer of 1846 had handed him everything he came for: a village lived in, herds hunted, mountains touched, and a notebook full of a West that within a few years, gold in California, war's end with Mexico, armies and treaties on the plains, would be unrecognizable.

Lesson 7

The westward movement in American memory

Parkman came home on steamboats, half blind and exhausted, and got to work. His narrative ran first as magazine installments in The Knickerbocker from 1847 to 1849, then appeared as a book in 1849 under the title The California and Oregon Trail, later shortened to the name everyone knows. It made his reputation, and he spent the rest of his life justifying it, writing the great multi volume history of France and England in North America that scholars still respect, much of it composed while nearly blind, dictating or writing by touch with a wooden frame to guide his hand. The reckless ride of 1846 had done its work: it turned a sickly Bostonian into America's historian of the frontier.

The migration he had watched at its beginning became one of the largest peaceful movements of people in the century: over the trail's great decades, some four hundred thousand emigrants crossed to Oregon, California, and Utah, and the road he rode became a national symbol: covered wagons, pioneer grit, families remaking the map. The ruts their wheels cut are still visible in Wyoming rock and Nebraska sod. The story entered schoolbooks, novels, paintings, and eventually a famous classroom computer game that taught new generations the words dysentery and ford the river, usually at the cost of a fictional family. Even the landmarks along the road, Chimney Rock, Scotts Bluff, Register Cliff, Independence Rock, became entries in a shared national diary that millions of schoolchildren learned by heart.

Memory, though, keeps widening, and a good course should end there. The westward movement that filled American mythology also displaced the Native nations who had hosted, traded with, fought, and sometimes rescued the emigrants; the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, five years after Parkman's summer, tried to draw lines the following decades repeatedly broke. Modern telling holds both truths at once: the emigrants' courage and endurance were real, and so was the cost paid by the peoples in their way. Parkman's book belongs in that fuller memory, read with pleasure for its living detail and with the clear eyes you practiced in Lesson 4. No other writer puts you in the saddle in 1846. Just remember whose country the saddle was crossing. Holding both truths at once, admiration and grief together, is the grown up way to love a country's past, and Parkman's flawed, blazing book is a fine place to practice it.

Sources

The Book Behind This Course

This course is taught from Parkman's own book, written from the journal he kept on the ride. It is free for anyone to read in full at Project Gutenberg.

• The Oregon Trail, by Francis Parkman (1849), Project Gutenberg

Graduation

You finished the Oregon Trail

You outfitted at Independence, walked the Platte under Parkman's eyes, lived in an Oglala village, charged the buffalo, and turned for home down the Arkansas. You also learned to read a classic with both gratitude and judgment, which is the only honest way to read one. The trail is behind you; the questions it raises about courage, memory, and whose land it crossed will travel with you a good deal farther.

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