The Santa FÉ trade had just been started upon its long career when trappers discovered in the Rocky Mountains, not far from where the forty-second parallel intersects the continental divide, an easy crossing by which access might be had from the waters of the upper Platte to those of the Pacific Slope. South Pass, as this passage through the hills soon came to be called, was the gateway to Oregon. As yet the United States had not an inch of uncontested soil upon the Pacific, but in years to come a whole civilization was to pour over the upper trail to people the valley of the Columbia and claim it for new states. The Santa FÉ trail was chiefly the route of commerce. The Oregon trail became the pathway of a people westward bound.

In its earliest years the Oregon trail knew only the fur traders, those nameless pioneers who possessed an accurate rule-of-thumb knowledge of every hill and valley of the mountains nearly a generation before the surveyor and his transit brought them within the circle of recorded facts. The historian of the fur trade, Major Hiram Martin Chittenden, has tracked out many of them with the same laborious industry that carried them after the beaver and the other marketable furs. When they first appeared is lost in tradition. That they were everywhere in the period between the journey of Lewis and Clark, in 1805, and the rise of Independence as an outfitting post, in 1832, is clearly manifest. That they discovered every important geographic fact of the West is quite as certain as it is that their discoveries were often barren, were generally unrecorded in a formal way, and exercised little influence upon subsequent settlement and discovery. Their place in history is similar to that of those equally nameless ship captains of the thirteenth century who knew and charted the shore of the Mediterranean at a time when scientific geographers were yet living on a flat earth and shaping cosmographies from the Old Testament. Although the fur-traders, with their great companies behind them, did less to direct the future than their knowledge of geography might have warranted, they managed to secure a foothold upon the Pacific coast early in the century. Astoria, in 1811, was only a pawn in the game between the British and American organizations, whose control over Oregon was so confusing that Great Britain and the United States, in 1818, gave up the task of drawing a boundary when they reached the Rockies, and allowed the country beyond to remain under joint occupation.

In the thirties, religious enthusiasm was added to the profits of the fur trade as an inducement to visit Oregon. By 1832 the trading prospects had incited migration outside the regular companies. Nathaniel J. Wyeth took out his first party in this year. He repeated the journey with a second party in 1834. The Methodist church sent a body of missionaries to convert the western Indians in this latter year. The American Board of Foreign Missions sent out the redoubtable Marcus Whitman in 1835. Before the thirties were over Oregon had become a household word through the combined reports of traders and missionaries. Its fertility and climate were common themes in the lyceums and on the lecture platform; while the fact that this garden might through prompt migration be wrested from the British gave an added inducement. Joint occupation was yet the rule, but the time was approaching when the treaty of 1818 might be denounced, a time when Oregon ought to become the admitted property of the United States. The thirties ended with no large migration begun. But the financial crisis of 1837, which unsettled the frontier around the Great Lakes, provided an impoverished and restless population ready to try the chance in the farthest West.

A growing public interest in Oregon roused the United States government to action in the early forties. The Indians of the Northwest were in need of an agent and sound advice. The exact location of the trail, though the trail itself was fairly well known, had not been ascertained. Into the hands of the senators from Missouri fell the task of inspiring the action and directing the result. Senator Linn was the father of bills and resolutions looking towards a territory west of the mountains; while Benton, patron of the fur trade, received for his new son-in-law, John C. FrÉmont, a detail in command of an exploring party to the South Pass.

The career of FrÉmont, the Pathfinder, covers twenty years of great publicity, beginning with his first command in 1842. On June 10, of this year, with some twenty-one guides and men, he departed from Cyprian Chouteau's place on the Kansas, ten miles above its mouth. He shortly left the Kansas, crossed country to Grand Island in the Platte, and followed the Platte and its south branch to St. Vrain's Fort in northern Colorado, where he arrived in thirty days. From St. Vrain's he skirted the foothills north to Fort Laramie. Thence, ascending the Sweetwater, he reached his destination at South Pass on August 8, just one day previous to the signing of the great English treaty at Washington. At South Pass his journey of observation was substantially over. He continued, however, for a few days along the Wind River Range, climbing a mountain peak and naming it for himself. By October he was back in St. Louis with his party.

In the spring of 1843, FrÉmont started upon a second and more extended governmental exploration to the Rockies. This time he followed a trail along the Kansas River and its Republican branch to St. Vrain's, whence he made a detour south to Boiling Spring and Bent's trading-post on the Arkansas River. Mules were scarce, and Colonel Bent was relied upon for a supply. Returning to the Platte, he divided his company, sending part of it over his course of 1842 to Laramie and South Pass, while he led his own detachment directly from St. Vrain's into the Medicine Bow Range, and across North Park, where rises the North Platte. Before reaching Fort Hall, where he was to reunite his party, he made another detour to Great Salt Lake, that he might feel like Balboa as he looked upon the inland sea. From Fort Hall, which he reached on September 18, he followed the emigrant route by the valley of the Snake to the Dalles of the Columbia.

Whether the ocean could be reached by any river between the Columbia and Colorado was a matter of much interest to persons concerned with the control of the Pacific. The facts, well enough known to the trappers, had not yet received scientific record when FrÉmont started south from the Dalles in November, 1843, to ascertain them. His march across the Nevada desert was made in the dead of winter under difficulties that would have brought a less resolute explorer to a stop. It ended in March, 1844, at Sutter's ranch in the Sacramento Valley, with half his horses left upon the road. His homeward march carried him into southern California and around the sources of the Colorado, proving by recorded observation the difficult character of the country between the mountains and the Pacific.

In following years the Pathfinder revisited the scenes of these two expeditions upon which his reputation is chiefly based. A man of resolution and moderate ability, the glory attendant upon his work turned his head. His later failures in the face of military problems far beyond his comprehension tended to belittle the significance of his earlier career, but history may well agree with the eminent English traveller, Burton, who admits that: "Every foot of ground passed over by Colonel FrÉmont was perfectly well known to the old trappers and traders, as the interior of Africa to the Arab and Portuguese pombeiros. But this fact takes nothing away from the honors of the man who first surveyed and scientifically observed the country." Through these two journeys the Pacific West rose in clear definition above the American intellectual horizon. "The American Eagle," quoth the Platte (Missouri) Eagle in 1843, "is flapping his wings, the precurser [sic] of the end of the British lion, on the shores of the Pacific. Destiny has willed it."

The year in which FrÉmont made his first expedition to the mountains was also the year of the first formal, conducted emigration to Oregon. Missionaries beyond the mountains had urged upon Congress the appointment of an American representative and magistrate for the country, with such effect that Dr. Elijah White, who had some acquaintance with Oregon, was sent out as sub-Indian agent in the spring of 1842. With him began the regular migration of homeseekers that peopled Oregon during the next ten years. His emigration was not large, perhaps eighteen Pennsylvania wagons and 130 persons; but it seems to have been larger than he expected, and large enough to raise doubt as to the practicability of taking so many persons across the plains at once. In the decade following, every May, when pasturage was fresh and green, saw pioneers gathering, with or without premeditation, at the bend of the Missouri, bound for Oregon. Independence and its neighbor villages continued to be the posts of outfit. How many in the aggregate crossed the plains can never be determined, in spite of the efforts of the pioneer societies of Oregon to record their names. The distinguishing feature of the emigration was its spontaneous individualistic character. Small parties, too late for the caravan, frequently set forth alone. Single families tried it often enough to have their wanderings recorded in the border papers. In the spring following the crossing of Elijah White emigrants gathered by hundreds at the Missouri ferries, until an estimate of a thousand in all is probably not too high. In 1844 the tide subsided a little, but in 1845 it established a new mark in the vicinity of three thousand, and in 1847 ran between four and five thousand. These were the highest figures, yet throughout the decade the current flowed unceasingly.

The migration of 1843, the earliest of the fat years, may be taken as typical of the Oregon movement. Early in the year faces turned toward the Missouri rendezvous. Men, women, and children, old and young, with wagons and cattle, household equipment, primitive sawmills, and all the impedimenta of civilization were to be found in the hopeful crowd. For some days after departure the unwieldy party, a thousand strong, with twice as many cattle and beasts of burden, held together under Burnett, their chosen captain. But dissension beyond his control soon split the company. In addition to the general fear that the number was dangerously high, the poorer emigrants were jealous of the rich. Some of the latter had in their equipment cattle and horses by the score, and as the poor man guarded these from the Indian thieves during his long night watches he felt the injustice which compelled him to protect the property of another. Hence the party broke early in June. A "cow column" was formed of those who had many cattle and heavy belongings; the lighter body went on ahead, though keeping within supporting distance; and under two captains the procession moved on. The way was tedious rather than difficult, but habit soon developed in the trains a life that was full and complete. Oregon, one of the migrants of 1842 had written, was a "great country for unmarried gals." Courtship and marriage began almost before the States were out of sight. Death and burial, crime and punishment, filled out the round of human experience, while Dr. Whitman was more than once called upon in his professional capacity to aid in the enlargement of the band.

The trail to Oregon was the longest road yet developed in the United States. It started from the Missouri River anywhere between Independence and Council Bluffs. In the beginning, Independence was the common rendezvous, but as the agricultural frontier advanced through Iowa in the forties numerous new crossings and ferries were made further up the stream. From the various ferries the start began, as did the Santa FÉ trade, sometime in May. By many roads the wagons moved westward towards the point from which the single trail extended to the mountains. East of Grand Island, where the Platte River reaches its most southerly point, these routes from the border were nearly as numerous as the caravans, but here began the single highway along the river valley, on its southern side. At this point, in the years immediately after the Mexican War, the United States founded a military post to protect the emigrants, naming it for General Stephen W. Kearny, commander of the Army of the West. From Fort Kearney (custom soon changed the spelling of the name) to the fur-trading post at Laramie Creek the trail followed the river and its north fork. Fort Laramie itself was bought from the fur company and converted into a military post which became a second great stopping-place for the emigrants. Shortly west of Laramie, the Sweetwater guided the trail to South Pass, where, through a gap twenty miles in width, the main commerce between the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific was forced to go. Beyond South Pass, Wyeth's old Fort Hall was the next post of importance on the road. From Fort Hall to Fort BoisÉ the trail continued down the Snake, cutting across the great bend of the river to meet the Columbia near Walla Walla.

The journey to Oregon took about five months. Its deliberate, domesticated progress was as different as might be from the commercial rush to Santa FÉ. Starting too late, the emigrant might easily get caught in the early mountain winter, but with a prompt start and a wise guide, or pilot, winter always found the homeseeker in his promised land. "This is the right manner to settle the Oregon question," wrote Niles, after he had counted over the emigrants of 1844.

Before the great migration of 1843 reached Oregon the pioneers already there had taken the law to themselves and organized a provisional government in the Willamette Valley. The situation here, under the terms of the joint occupation treaty, was one of considerable uncertainty. National interests prompted settlers to hope and work for future control by one country or the other, while advantage seemed to incline to the side of Dr. McLoughlin, the generous factor of the British fur companies. But the aggressive Americans of the early migrations were restive under British leadership. They were fearful also lest future American emigration might carry political control out of their hands into the management of newcomers. Death and inheritance among their number had pointed to a need for civil institutions. In May, 1843, with all the ease invariably shown by men of Anglo-Saxon blood when isolated together in the wilderness, they formed a voluntary association for government and adopted a code of laws.

Self-confidence, the common asset of the West, was not absent in this newest American community. "A few months since," wrote Elijah White, "at our Oregon lyceum, it was unanimously voted that the colony of Wallamette held out the most flattering encouragement to immigrants of any colony on the globe." In his same report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the sub-Indian agent described the course of events. "During my up-country excursion, the whites of the colony convened, and formed a code of laws to regulate intercourse between themselves during the absence of law from our mother country, adopting in almost all respects the Iowa code. In this I was consulted, and encouraged the measure, as it was so manifestly necessary for the collection of debts, securing rights in claims, and the regulation of general intercourse among the whites."

A messenger was immediately sent east to beg Congress for the extension of United States laws and jurisdiction over the territory. His journey was six months later than the winter ride of Marcus Whitman, who went to Boston to save the missions of the American Board from abandonment, and might with better justice than Whitman's be called the ride to save Oregon. But Oregon was in no danger of being lost, however dilatory Congress might be. The little illegitimate government settled down to work, its legislative committee enacted whatever laws were needed for local regulation, and a high degree of law and order prevailed.

Sometimes the action of the Americans must have been meddlesome and annoying to the English and Canadian trappers. In the free manners of the first half of the nineteenth century the use of strong drink was common throughout the country and universal along the frontier. "A family could get along very well without butter, wheat bread, sugar, or tea, but whiskey was as indispensable to housekeeping as corn-meal, bacon, coffee, tobacco, and molasses. It was always present at the house raising, harvesting, road working, shooting matches, corn husking, weddings, and dances. It was never out of order 'where two or three were gathered together.'" Yet along with this frequent intemperance, a violent abstinence movement was gaining way. Many of the Oregon pioneers came from Iowa and the new Northwest, full of the new crusade and ready to support it. Despite the lack of legal right, though with every moral justification, attempts were made to crush the liquor traffic with the Indians. White tells of a mass meeting authorizing him to take action on his own responsibility; of his enlisting a band of coadjutors; and, finally, of finding "the distillery in a deep, dense thicket, 11 miles from town, at 3 o'clock P.M. The boiler was a large size potash kettle, and all the apparatus well accorded. Two hogsheads and eight barrels of slush or beer were standing ready for distillation, with part of one barrel of molasses. No liquor was to be found, nor as yet had much been distilled. Having resolved on my course, I left no time for reflection, but at once upset the nearest cask, when my noble volunteers immediately seconded my measures, making a river of beer in a moment; nor did we stop till the kettle was raised, and elevated in triumph at the prow of our boat, and every cask, with all the distilling apparatus, was broken to pieces and utterly destroyed. We then returned, in high cheer, to the town, where our presence and report gave general joy."

The provisional government lasted for several years, with a fair degree of respect shown to it by its citizens. Like other provisional governments, it was weakest when revenue was in question, but its courts of justice met and satisfied a real need of the settlers. It was long after regular settlement began before Congress acquired sure title to the country and could pass laws for it.

The Oregon question, muttering in the thirties, thus broke out loudly in the forties. Emigrants then rushed west in the great migrations with deliberate purpose to have and to hold. Once there, they demanded, with absolute confidence, that Congress protect them in their new homes. The stories of the election of 1844, the Oregon treaty of 1846, and the erection of a territorial government in 1848 would all belong to an intimate study of the Oregon trail.

In the election of 1844 Oregon became an important question in practical politics. Well-informed historians no longer believe that the annexation of Texas was the result of nothing but a deep-laid plot of slaveholders to acquire more lands for slave states and more southern senators. All along the frontier, whether in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, or in Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi, population was restive under hard times and its own congenital instinct to move west to cheaper lands. Speculation of the thirties had loaded up the eastern states with debts and taxes, from which the states could not escape with honor, but from under which their individual citizens could emigrate. Wherever farm lands were known, there went the home-seekers, and it needs no conspiracy explanation to account for the presence, in the platform, of a party that appealed to the great plain people, of planks for the reannexation of Texas and the whole of Oregon. With a Democratic party strongest in the South, the former extension was closer to the heart, but the whole West could subscribe to both.

Oregon included the whole domain west of the Rockies, between Spanish Mexico at 42° and Russian America, later known as Alaska, at 54° 40´. Its northern and southern boundaries were clearly established in British and Spanish treaties. Its eastern limit by the old treaty of 1818 was the continental divide, since the United States and Great Britain were unable either to allot or apportion it. Title which should justify a claim to it was so equally divided between the contesting countries that it would be difficult to make out a positive claim for either, while in fact a compromise based upon equal division was entirely fair. But the West wanted all of Oregon with an eagerness that saw no flaw in the United States title. That the democratic party was sincere in asking for all of it in its platform is clearer with respect to the rank and file of the organization than with the leaders of the party. Certain it is that just so soon as the execution of the Texas pledge provoked a war with Mexico, President Polk, himself both a westerner and a frontiersman, was ready to eat his words and agree with his British adversary quickly.

Congress desired, after Polk's election in 1844, to serve a year's notice on Great Britain and bring joint occupation to an end. But more pacific advices prevailed in the mouth of James Buchanan, Secretary of State, so that the United States agreed to accept an equitable division instead of the whole or none. The Senate, consulted in advance upon the change of policy, gave its approval both before and after to the treaty which, signed June 15, 1846, extended the boundary line of 49° from the Rockies to the Pacific. The settled half of Oregon and the greater part of the Columbia River thus became American territory, subject to such legislation as Congress should prescribe. A territory of Oregon, by law of 1848, was the result of the establishment of the first clear American title on the Pacific. All that the United States had secured in the division was given the popular name. Missionary activity and the fur trade, and, above all, popular agricultural conquest, had established the first detached American colony, with the desert separating it from the mother country. The trail was already well known to thousands, and so clearly defined by wheel ruts and dÉbris along the sides that even the blind could scarce wander from the beaten path. A temporary government, sufficient for the immediate needs of the inhabitants, had at once paved the way for the legitimate territory and revealed the high degree of law and morality prevailing in the population. Already the older settlers were prosperous, and the first chapter in the history of Oregon was over. A second great trail had still further weakened the hold of the American desert over the American mind, endangering, too, the Indian policy that was dependent upon the desert for its continuance.