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End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center [Home] - [History 101]
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Who Explored the Oregon Trail? The emigrants of the 1840s were not the first to travel the Oregon Trail. The colorful history of our country makes heroes out of the explorers, mountain men, soldiers, and scientists who opened up the West. In 1540 the Spanish explorer Coronado ventured as far north as present-day Kansas, but the inland routes across the plains remained the sole domain of Native Americans until 1804, when Lewis and Clark skirted the edges on their epic journey of discovery to the Pacific Northwest and Zeb Pike explored the "Great American Desert," as the Great Plains were then known. The Lewis and Clark Expedition had a direct influence on the economy of the West even before the explorers had returned to St. Louis. Private John Colter left the expedition on the way home in 1806 to take up the fur trade business. For the next 20 years the likes of Manuel Lisa, Auguste and Pierre Choteau, William Ashley, James Bridger, Kit Carson, Tom Fitzgerald, and William Sublette roamed the West. These part romantic adventurers, part self-made entrepreneurs, part hermits were called mountain men. By 1829, Jedediah Smith knew more about the West than any other person alive. The Americans became involved in the fur trade in 1810 when John Jacob Astor, at the insistence of his friend Thomas Jefferson, founded the Pacific Fur Company in New York. Astor sent Wilson Price Hunt west in 1811. Hunt followed the Lewis and Clark route as far as the Dakotas and then went overland across Union Pass, near Jackson Hole. The choice of routes proved unsuitable, and it was after much hardship that the Hunt party arrived in Astoria (known then as Fort Astor) in the spring of 1812. Astor had also sent the ship Tonquin to Astoria under Captain Jonathon Thorn. The Tonquin's crew established Fort Astor in April of 1811 before sailing north to trade with the Indians of Vancouver Island, a well-known port of call for ships trading in furs. Captain Thorn's cruelty -- he was said to be mad by some of his crew -- provoked the Indians to attack the ship and massacre its crew. It is believed that a mortally wounded sailor by the name of Thomas Lewis set fire to the Tonquin's powder magazine, blowing himself, his ship, and as many as several hundred Salish Indians to smithereens. The situation at Fort Astor worsened such that when John George McTavish of the North West Company -- the British competition to Astor's venture -- arrived in the spring of 1813 bearing news of the War of 1812, the fort was soon surrendered. With a Royal Navy ship dispatched to seize Fort Astor as a prize of war, the Astorians decided to sell out to the NWC. Fort Astor became Fort George without violence. In the winter of 1812, before the British takeover, Robert Stuart of Fort Astor returned to St. Louis. He arrived on April 30, 1813, with six men, one of whom had gone insane from the stress of the journey. Stuart and his party were the first to travel the route of the Oregon Trail, although they did so in reverse. Their great contribution to American history was the discovery of the South Pass across the Continental Divide, the gateway for the hundreds of thousands of emigrants to come. However, John Jacob Astor considered knowledge of the South Pass to be proprietary information of great value to his Pacific Fur Company, and he suppressed word of its existence so successfully that credit for the discovery of the South Pass was for many years incorrectly attributed to Jed Smith, who found it on his own some years later. About ten years after Stuart's journey, when the Canadian Northwest Fur Company was being merged with the Hudson's Bay Company and operations at Fort George were transferred to Fort Vancouver, Peter Skene Ogden was on his way to Oregon. The Canadian-born son of a Revolutionary War Loyalist, he had gained the reputation of a hellion within the HBC. He is known to have attempted to incinerate a companion for the sport of it, assaulted an HBC official and beat him near to death, and led an entire outpost in a mutiny. For this, he was banished from the seat of HBC operations in eastern Canada in 1824 and assigned to Fort Vancouver. Chief Factor John McLoughlin, the senior official at Fort Vancouver, repeatedly sent Ogden to inspect distant forts and undertake lengthy journeys of exploration -- probably just to keep him out of the way at first, but he proved an able explorer. By the 1830s, Ogden knew more of the West than anyone other than famed mountain man Jedediah Smith. The results of Ogden's explorations were delivered to European cartographers, and the maps which they produced soon found their way to the United States where, ironically, they helped pave the way for the explorers and emigrants who would displace the British presence in the area. Two lesser-known explorers who made direct impacts on the Oregon and California Trails were James Reddeford Walker and Captain Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville. Walker founded the town of Independence in Missouri in 1829, the same year John McLoughlin started what would become Oregon City. Walker met Captain Bonneville by chance in 1831, and together they followed the Platte River route, already a familiar trail by this time, over the South Pass to the Green River Rendezvous of 1833. Walker and Bonneville split their party there, with Walker heading southwest toward California and Bonneville northwest towards Oregon. Walker found a route to California which was passable by wagons and, obviously realizing the significance of this, later led the first wagon train over Walker Pass into southern (Mexican) California. For his part, Captain Bonneville explored west as far as the confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers following a route very close to what became the Oregon Trail. Scientists followed parts of the Oregon Trail as early as 1818. Harvard botanist Thomas Nuttal traveled with mountain man Manuel Lisa collecting plants in the Missouri River valley, and he later came to the Oregon Country with Nathaniel Wyeth. John James Audubon collected specimens of quadrupeds. Frederick Paul Wilhelm, Duke of Wurttenberg, collected birds and Indian artifacts. Sir William Drummond Stewart of Scotland traveled what was to become the Oregon Trail from 1833 to 1838. He correctly foresaw the end of the fur trade and the coming of the emigrants starting with the missionaries. The exploration of the Oregon Trail route also included a military presence. The first expedition was led by Stephen H. Long, who was sent by Secretary of War John C. Calhoun in 1819 to make a show of force along the Platte River and scare off British traders from the new American territory. Starting in 1842, John C. Fremont, guided by Kit Carson, followed similar orders during his journey from Independence to Fort Vancouver to California. In 1841, Antarctic explorer Captain Charles Wilkes was sent on a spying mission to Oregon and San Francisco. All of the knowledge of the explorers and traders was put together in 1834 when Nathaniel Wyeth and Jason Lee led the first people over the route of the Oregon Trail with the intention of settling in the Oregon Country. End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center [Home] - [History 101]
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