Oregon Trail

The route of the Oregon Trail, one of the main overland migration routes on the North American continent, had begun to be scouted out as early as 1823 by fur traders and explorers.

The trail has begun to be regularly used by fur traders, missionaries, and military expeditions in the 1830s

At the same time, small groups of individuals and the occasional family have attempted to follow the trail, and some have succeeded in arriving at Fort Vancouver in Washington.

On May 1, 1839, a group of men from Peoria, Illinois, sets out with the intention to colonize the Oregon Country on behalf of the United States of America and drive out the British fur trading companies operating there.

The men of the Peoria Party, who are among the first pioneers to blaze the Oregon Trail, are led by Thomas J. Farnham and call themselves the Oregon Dragoons.

They carry a large flag emblazoned with their motto "OREGON OR THE GRAVE.”

Although the group will split up on the trail, several of their members will reach the Oregon Country to become among the prominent early pioneers of this region.

American hunters and trappers trade with the natives throughout the West and explore the land.

Mountain Men, as skilled fighters and hunters, trap beaver in small groups throughout the Rocky Mountains.

With the demise of the fur trade, they have established trading posts throughout the west, continuing to trade with the indigenous peoples.

They also serve as guides and hunters for the western migration of settlers to Utah, Oregon, and California.

Westward expansion by official acts of the U.S. Government has been accompanied by the western (and northern in the case of New England) movement of settlers on and beyond the frontier.

The frontiersman Daniel Boone, for example, had pioneered the settlement of Kentucky.

Jedediah Smith, at twenty-nine, has traveled more extensively in unknown territory than any other single mountain man.

Having rediscovered the South Pass in 1824, Smith opens the connecting trail between California and the Oregon Country in 1828, reaching the Willamette Valley in July.

Smith reaches the Columbia River in August, his blazing of the Pacific Overland Trail making the American Republic’s awakening claims upon the Far West a little less tenuous than those of its British and Russian rivals.

The earliest European or American visitors along the Siskiyou Trail, the shortest practical travel path between early settlements in California and Oregon, were likely hunters and trappers connected with the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) who, in the 1820s, began to travel the rivers of Southern Oregon and Northern California in search of fur and pelts.

The HBC had established itself on the Columbia River, and built Fort Vancouver, its regional headquarters in 1824.

HBC parties began to explore south toward California in 1825.

Alexander McLeod led exploration and trapping parties south beginning in 1826, reaching the Klamath River in 1827, and the Sacramento River in 1828.

In 1829 he leads the first HBC trapping expedition to the Sacramento Valley, which reaches as far south as today's Stockton.

McLeod's exploring and trapping expeditions essentially establishes the Siskiyou Trail, linking Fort Vancouver with the Sacramento Valley.

At first it is known by names such as the California Brigade Trail and the Southern Party Trail.

McLeod and other members of his parties reported that the Native Americans south of the Umpqua River, along the Klamath and Siuslaw Rivers, had never seen white men before.

Although the 42nd parallel (today the boundary between California and Oregon) marks the northern border of Mexican California, the Mexicans know little about the interior and the HBC trappers range south at will.

Other HBC trappers who make early use of the Siskiyou Trail include Peter Skene Ogden and Michel Laframboise.

Jedediah Smith, traveling east across the Rocky Mountains in March 1829, traverses the Bitterroot Range to the Flathead River in present Montana, then turns south to ...

...conclude his epic two-year journey in August at Pierre’s Hole, a shallow valley located in the drainage of the south fork of the Teton River in present Idaho.

John Colter, a member of the earlier Lewis & Clark Expedition and widely considered to be the first of the ‘mountain men,’ had asserted that he passed through the valley in 1808.

The south fork of the Teton River heads north through its mountain meadows, flanked by stands of timber, to rendezvous with the Snake River.

To mountain men, a low-lying valley surrounded by mountains is a "hole."

Mountain men work these areas as rivers and streams create good habitat for beaver and other fur-bearing animals.

This beaver rich basin is named in honor of "le grand Pierre" Tivanitagon, a Hudson's Bay Company trader said to be of Iroquois descent, who had been killed in a battle with members of the Blackfoot Confederacy in 1827.

The Hudson's Bay Company controls the fur trade in the Willamette Valley and the rest of Oregon Country in the 1820s and 1830s from its Columbia District headquarters at Fort Vancouver.

The Willamette Valley is largely inhabited by bands of the native Kalapuya tribe throughout the nineteenth century.

As many as ninety percent of the Kalapuya may have died as a result of an epidemic of "fever and ague" that hit the Willamette Valley between 1830 and 1833.

The first Euramericans to visit the Columbia River, noting that the tops of Salish heads were not pointed like those of neighboring tribes who practice vertical head binding, called them the Flathead Indians.

In response to a visit by four Flatheads to St. Louis and an entreaty to General William Clark for someone to bring the "Book of Heaven", prophesied in a vision, to the Salish people, thirty-year-old Jason Lee had been chosen to head a Methodist mission to the Salish.

Born on a farm near Stanstead, Quebec, Lee travels overland with a part of missionaries, arriving in Fort Vancouver in 1834.

After the site of their first mission is abandoned as unhealthy, ...