The Way to the West / and the Lives of Three Early Americans: Boone-Crockett-Carson

lorado, the Red, the Sacramento, the Arkansas, perhaps even the Ohio, were known before their sources were fully explored. The journey over the Appala

ilized, the first two decades of the century last past were

er, and it cost him a long walk to Chihuahua. Yet he was as accurate as the famous Baron von Humboldt, who thought the Pecos River was a tributary of the Red. Major Long, in 1820, dropped down

ered challenge to many bold men, the story of whose exploits forms one of the most glowing chapters of American hero history. These divers pursuits, these evidences of an up-stream travel an

the men that moved west from Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee into Missouri and other parts of the trans-Mississippi. Many of these made the old town of St. Louis their general starting point,

s was Nathaniel J. Wyeth, of Massachusetts, who, in 1832, led the first continuous expedition from New England to the mouth of the Columbia, a man whose pluck and energy deserved a better fate than he encountered. It was this same Wyeth who, in 1834, founded one of the first establishments west of the Rockies, that Fort Hall, often mentioned in the story of the fur trade, which w

we nearly lost what Oregon we have to Great Britain and her own hardy trappers. Wyeth and his friends brought back word to the East, which at last the ever hesitating, ever doubting Eastern men believed. At last we summoned together our senses, our halting diplomacy, with the result that we kept our mar

century it was much nearer and much better known; and it was so solely because, under the existing conditions of travel, it was

the town of Independence. It followed up the ancient valley of the Platte, immemorial highway of the tribes, and le

name was left to the beautiful valley below the Yellowstone Park, called even to-day Jackson's Hole. We have heard of the wanderings of Campbell, Fitzpatrick, Sublette, of Jim Bridger, and of General Ashley himself, prince of early mountain traders, father of a bold crew of young successors. We shall present

the Missouri and the Yellowstone. The Missouri River and its tributaries gave them their natural roadways; but all these scattered posts, all this devious ancient roadway of the waters, lay far to the northward, on the upper curve of a great arc, the winding way traced out by Lewis and Clark, the way of the up-stream wanderers. The streams ever appealed to explorers. Any man going into unknown country instinctively clings to the waterways,

great a distance another preordained pathway of the waters-that of the river Platte, ancient road of the Indian tribes. It was within natural reason, therefore, that the travelers should break away, should leave the upper wate

so many years. Thus, then, began the great Oregon trail, this road that might, with justice, have been called an open highway when Frémont "explored" the Rockies, albeit a highway almost unsettled, as it is to-day over much of its length, though peopled thick with mighty memories. The Mormons, the Missourians,

trail; since we know he forsook the Missouri and started overland, possibly up the Platte, crossing some of the country which the Astorians later saw. We hear also of the trapper Ezekiel Williams[36] in 1807, and some of the advance guards of the M

and traders, all of whom rode, we may be sure, along the easiest ways; which meant the Sweetwater and the South Pass after the Platte was left behind. These followed the route of the Oregon trail for the compelling reason of topography. Now came Bonneville and his wagons to deepen the trail, in 1832; and two years later than that, in 1834, Robert Campbell and William Sublette built old Fort Laram

old post, and used it as a military establishment, so adding to its long and exciting history. Eight years after the building of Fort Laramie, Fort Bridger wa

st thenceforth feed Mormons, or guide government officers in their "explorations." Bridger gave up the West as a squeezed orange at just the time Frémont was starting out to make his name as the "Pathfi

ed to Bridger's old log fortress. The trail brought on an ever-growing stream of travel. In time Fort Bridger, too, became an army post, and remained such from 1857 till 1890. Since

e might be said to begin in 1834,[38] when it was first used as a route straight through to Oregon. After that dat

nd for Oregon. Father de Smet, great man and good, a missionary also, followed in 1840; then more missionaries from New England-always prolific of missionaries; and two years later Frémont, as far at least as the South Pass. Then came the Mormons in 1847, bound for their kingdom of Deseret, and the Oregon Battalion in the same year; these followed soon thereafter by a

om their settlements to occupy the Green River valley, and who used the trail for a short way. General Albert Sidney

to railway engineers looking for more direct lines across the wastes. Perhaps we shall some day see a line of rails follow throughout the two thousand miles of this ancient trail. Even so, our American tourists would still go to Europe in search of ruins and history and memories! We know and care all

ighteen hundred land hunters left the city of Chicago for the country of the Northwest. Two-thirds of these came from the crow

n end of that Oregon trail, for the price per head of thirty dollars. The old "Whoa-haw" route once demanded a year of time and a heart of steel, as part of the

edge of the region that could ever be called America! This is the story of a land that even Thomas Benton, a big man, and always a friend of the West, really in his own conscience thought could never, by any possibility, extend its national and civilized limits west of the Rockies! This is the record of a region which, in the beginnings of the Oregon trail, our ablest m

ceased to trap beaver, and four years after the first Frémont expedition.[39] He says: "Emigrants from every part of the country were preparing for the journey to Oregon and California;" and adds, "An unusual number of traders we

the bosom of solitude itself. We knew that, more and more, year after year, the trains of the emigrant wagons would creep in slow procession toward barbarous Oregon or wild California, but we did not dream, how Commerce and Gold would breed nations along the Pacific, the disenchanting

s' march west of Leavenworth he saw many antlers of elk and skulls of buffalo, "reminders of the animals once swarming over this now deserted region." This intervening country between the Missouri River and the plains proper he considers to serve the popular notion of the "prairie." "For this it is," he writes, "f

witnessed a party of Indian women and children bathing in the stream, while meantime "a long train of emigrants with their heavy wagons was crossing the creek, and dragging on in slow procession by the encampment of the people whom they and their descendants, in the space of a century, are to sweep from the face of the earth." This was toward the headwaters of the Platte, of course, not far from that Fort Laramie where he met the grandsons o

ureaus of carved oak. These, some of them no doubt the relics of ancestral prosperity in colonial times, must have encountered strange vicissitudes. Brought, perhaps, originally from England; then, with the declining fortunes of their owners, borne across the Alleghanies to the wilderness of Ohio or Kentucky; then to Illinois or Missouri; and now at last fondly stowed away for the interm

sistible. This great road of the prairies and the mountains, more than two thousand miles long, and level, smooth and easy, even though it crossed a continental divide-this unengineered triumph of engineering-lay directly at hand as the natural pathway of the American people. It was the longest highway of the world, unless that may be the

this little board, whose mission was to point the way across these miles of wild and uninhabited country! There were branch trails that came into the road from Leavenworth and St. Joseph, striking it above the point of departure from the Santa Fé trail; but the Oregon trail proper swung off from this fork, running steadily to the northwest, part of the time along the Little Blue River, until at length

ou Salade, within reach of the Spanish settlements and the head of the Arkansas, as we may see in reading of La Lande and of Purcell and of A

s to Fort Laramie, which was the last post on the eastern side of the Rockies. Thence the trail struggled on up the Platte, keeping close as it might to the stream, till it reached the Ford of

ce into the Sweetwater district, and was a sort of register of the wilderness, holding the rudely carved names of many of the greatest Western venturers, as well as many of no consequence. The Sweetwater takes us below the foot of the Bighorns, through the Devil's Gate, and leads us gently up to that remarkable crossing of the Rockies known as the South Pass, a s

s eleven hundred and thirty-six miles from Independence, and to the Soda Springs, on the big bend of the Bear, was twelve hundred and six miles. Thence one crossed over the height of land between the Bear and the Port Neuf rivers, the latter being Columbia water; and, at a distance of twelve hundred and eighty-eight miles from Independence, reached the very important point of Fort Hall, the post establish

nde valley, at the eastern edge of the difficult Blue Mountains, and seventeen hundred and thirty-six miles from the starting point. The railway to-day crosses the Blues where the old trail did. Then the route struck the Umatilla, and shortly thereafter the mighty Columbia, the "Oregon" of the poet, and a stream concerning which we were not always so placid as we are to-day. It was nineteen hundred and thirt

unknown lands, as well as of the men that followed them safely in later days. It was but a continuation of the way to the Mis

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white man to cross the bor

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useful dat

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apping ceased to be profitable, when the trappers came in, when the wild West began to become the civilized West. This date, remembered philosophically, will prove of the utmos

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n the ill-fated Frémont third expedition, among the

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I, Vol. III; "The

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e A: Ch

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ng the upper end of the Great Salt Lake, leaving the main t

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II; "Early Explorers