The FReeper Foxhole Remembers the Oregon Trail (1843) - Sep. 7th, 2005

Wild West Magazine | April 2000 | Bob Brooke

[SAMWolf]

Lord,

Keep our Troops forever in Your care

Give them victory over the enemy...

Grant them a safe and swift return...

Bless those who mourn the lost.
.

FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer
for all those serving their country at this time.

.................................................................. .................... ...........................................

U.S. Military History, Current Events and Veterans Issues

Where Duty, Honor and Country
are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.

Our Mission:

The FReeper Foxhole is dedicated to Veterans of our Nation's military forces and to others who are affected in their relationships with Veterans.

In the FReeper Foxhole, Veterans or their family members should feel free to address their specific circumstances or whatever issues concern them in an atmosphere of peace, understanding, brotherhood and support.

The FReeper Foxhole hopes to share with it's readers an open forum where we can learn about and discuss military history, military news and other topics of concern or interest to our readers be they Veteran's, Current Duty or anyone interested in what we have to offer.

If the Foxhole makes someone appreciate, even a little, what others have sacrificed for us, then it has accomplished one of it's missions.

We hope the Foxhole in some small way helps us to remember and honor those who came before us.

To read previous Foxhole threads or
to add the Foxhole to your sidebar,
click on the books below.

Oregon Trail:
Wagon Tracks West

For the Applegates and their fellow travelers, the Oregon Trail promised a golden ticket to the land of milk and honey. The reality, however, proved to be far grimmer.

In the spring of 1843, the first ripple of a coming tide of would-be settlers piled everything they owned into canvas-covered wagons, handcarts and any other vehicle that could move, and set out along a dim trace called "the Emigrant Road." They went by way of a route that was a broad ribbon of threads, sometimes intertwining, sometimes splitting off into frayed digressions. It ran beside waterways, stretched across tall-grass and short-grass prairies, wound through mountain passes, and then spanned the Pacific Slope to the promised lands of Oregon and California. One in 17 never made it. This road to the Far West soon became known by another name--the Oregon Trail.

Even today, ruts from the wagon wheels remain etched indelibly in the fragile topsoil of the Western landscape. The Oregon Trail opened at a time when the westward settlement and development of the trans-Mississippi West had stalled at the Missouri River; Mexico still claimed all of California, and Alaska remained Russian territory. Everything from California to Alaska and between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean was a British-held territory called Oregon. The trail pointed the way for the United States to expand westward to achieve what politicians of the day called its "Manifest Destiny" to reach "from sea to shining sea."

In 1843, the trickle of emigrants into Independence, Mo., began to swell. They came from all directions, by steamboat and over primitive roads that a day or two of heavy rain turned into quagmires. For the most part they were farmers--family men, with wives and children--who had a common goal of seeking a promised land of milk and honey in far-off Oregon, about which they knew as little as they did about how to get there. They did know that the back country of Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas had not proved to be a shining paradise. The doldrums that followed the depression of 1837 shriveled the value of land and the price of crops, and malaria ravaged the bottomlands that once had promised so much.



It was said that snow did not exist in California's golden valleys, that the black soil of Oregon was bottomless, that vast rivers afforded easy transportation, and that no forests barred the way to migrating wagons. Ignorance allowed travelers to advance where fuller knowledge might have rooted them with apprehension. But they were farm folk and had pioneered before. They were adept with wagons, livestock, rifles and axes. The women were used to walking beside the men as wilderness equals. Above all, they were restless--once a farm had been tamed, the narrow horizons of the backwoods communities closed around them. Vast and unclaimed riches far to the west, across the Great Plains, beckoned. It was as if the land itself were pulling the people westward. "As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea," wrote novelist Willa Cather in My Antonia. "And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running."

Many of these restless souls had heard of the success of Joe Meek and his friend Bob Newell, who had made it to Oregon in 1840. These two mountain men rigged up some wobbly wagons and trained "squaw ponies" to pull them. Meek and Newell managed to get the first wheeled vehicles over the Blue Mountains. The wagon trip ended at Fort Walla Walla, after which they took boats down the Columbia River to the Willamette River valley. The next year, John Bidwell and John Bartleson traveled what would later be christened the Oregon Trail on the first planned overland emigration west to California. At Soda Springs (in what is now southwest Idaho) one contingent split off for Oregon. In his Journal, Bidwell described the famous landmarks that would impress almost all Oregon Trail travelers--Courthouse Rock, Chimney Rock, Scotts Bluff, Fort Laramie and Independence Rock. In 1842, Dr. Elijah White, the newly appointed Indian agent in Oregon, successfully led 125 men, women and children there. But the real thrust westward came the following year, when the Oregon Trail took on a new significance thanks to the so-called Great Emigration.



By May 13, 1843, more than 900 emigrants bound for Oregon were encamped on the prairie at Fitzhugh's Mill, several miles from Independence, preparing for embarkment, dividing into companies, electing wagon masters and engaging veteran and self-proclaimed frontiersmen who professed to know the country to guide them. Peter Burnett was chosen captain, and a so-called cow column for slower wagons and herds of livestock was formed with Jesse Applegate as its leader. Applegate would later provide descriptions of life on the Oregon Trail in his memoir, A Day with the Cow Column in 1843. Mountain man John Gant was to be chief guide as far as Fort Hall. They would follow the trail left by Meek and Newell.

Marcus Whitman, a Protestant missionary and physician who had established a mission in Oregon in 1836, would join the Applegate train on his return west after an eastern visit. Doctors came to be a welcome rarity along the trail. Applegate called Whitman "that good angel" of the emigrants. "It is no disparagement to others to say that to no other individual are the emigrants of 1843 so indebted for their successful conclusion of their journey as to Dr. Marcus Whitman," he added.



Among the travelers was Jesse Applegate's young nephew and namesake. The 7-year-old boy's full name was Jesse Applegate Applegate to distinquish between them; he was called Jesse A. or just Jess. Along with his uncle, Jess traveled with his parents, four brothers, one sister and numerous other relatives. Years later, when he was in his 70s, he wrote Recollections of My Boyhood, in which he largely succeeds in portraying events and personalities from the 1843 western crossing through the eyes of a young boy. As the Applegate party journeyed across the prairies and over the Rockies, the trek had mostly seemed like grand fun to the boy. At first his recollections bubble with the thrill of adventure. The "gay and savage looking" Plains Indians had awed but not scared him. He had traded nails and bits of metal with Indian children and thrown buffalo chips at other white children. Later, though, the recollections become more somber. Jesse A. Applegate had also experiened the suffering that almost no early traveler on the Oregon Trail could avoid.

Food supplies would inevitably become low and water scarce. A bone-wrenching weariness would set in as the miseries mounted. Propaganda about Oregon and early accounts of travel west flourished in newspapers, pamphlets and emigrants' guidebooks, creating an Oregon fever. Oregon's image was that of a place of renewal, where everything was bigger and better and people could better themselves. The U.S. government made the new land seem even more appealing by offering Oregon settlers a square mile of land for almost nothing. But as the emigrants pushed overland, many lost sight of the vision that had set them going. That wasn't so surprising because, as Hiram Crittenden remembered, "the Trail was strewn with abandoned property, the skeletons of horses and oxen, and with freshly made mounds and headboards that told a pitiful tale."



The weight of hardship piled on hardship was enough, on occasion, to make men and women break down and cry, and perhaps even turn back. Yet most travelers summoned up reserves of courage and kept going. They endured every hardship from a mule kick in the shins to cholera. The ones who got through usually did so because of sheer determination.

The Applegate train began to assemble in late April, the best time to get rolling. The date of departure had to be selected with care. If they began the more than 2,000-mile journey too early in the spring, there would not be enough grass on the prairie to keep the livestock strong enough to travel. Animals would begin to sicken, slowing up the train. Such slowdowns would often throw off the schedule and sometimes cause major problems down the road. If they waited too long they might later be trapped in the mountains by early winter storms.



Over the years, other wagon trains used Westport, Leavenworth and St. Joseph as jumping-off points. The Applegate train used Independence, pre-eminent since 1827 as an outfitting center. Since the majority of emigrants were farmers with families, they often chose Murphy farm wagons as their chief means of transport. Conestoga wagons, which weighed 11Ž2 tons empty, were too heavy for travel where there were no roads. The heavier the wagon, the more likely it would bog down in mud or cause the team to break down. Oregon-bound travelers were advised to keep their wagons weighing less than 11 1/2 tons fully loaded. A new wagon and spare parts, which were almost always needed, would cost a family close to $100.

The wagons had 10-by-31 1/2-foot bodies, and their covers were made of canvas or a waterproofed sheeting called osnaburg. Frames of hickory bows supported the cloth tops, which protected pioneers from rain and sun. The rear wheels were 5 or 6 feet in diameter, but the front wheels were 4 feet or less so that they would not jam against the wagon body on sharp turns. Metal parts were kept to a minimum because of the weight, but the tires were made of iron to hold the wheels together and to protect the wooden rims. The rims and spokes would still sometimes crack and split, of course, and in the dry air of the Great Plains, they were also likely to shrink, which eventually caused the iron tires to slip off.



These early American mobile homes were called "prairie schooners" because they resembled a fleet of ships sailing across a sea of grass. In fact, when rivers were too deep to be forded and there was no timber to build rafts, the travelers would remove the wheels and float the wagons across.

Once he had selected a wagon or two, the pioneer next had to decide on his draft animals. Most emigrants, including Captain Burnett, swore by oxen. "The ox is the most noble animal, patient, thrifty, durable, and gentle," he said. "Unfortunately, they also had their drawbacks. Their cloven hoofs tended to splinter on mountain rocks, and oxen could only do about 15 miles a day, while mules did 20. "They don't walk," said one exasperated emigrant. "They plod."



Prosperous families usually took two or more wagons because the typical wagon did not have a large carrying capacity. After flour sacks, food, furniture, clothes and farm equipment were piled on, not much space remained. Space was so limited that, except in terrible weather, most travelers cooked, ate and slept outside. A.J. McCall wrote of his fellow travelers, "They laid in an over-supply of bacon, flour and beans, and in addition thereto every conceivable jimcrack and useless article that the wildest fancy could devise or human ingenuity could invent--pins and needles, brooms and brushes, ox shoes and horse shoes, lasts and leather, glass beads and hawk-bells, jumping jacks and jews-harps, rings and bracelets, pocket mirrors and pocket books, calico vests and boiled shirts." A passerby was reminded of birds building a nest while watching one family load its wagon. The members of the Applegate train often killed buffalo and antelope, but a more dependable supply of meat was the herd of cattle led behind the wagons.

Once the wagons were loaded, the animals gathered and the emigrants reasonably organized, Captain Peter Burnett finally gave the signal for the Applegates and the others to move out. The train included nearly 1,000 persons of both sexes, more than 200 wagons, 700 oxen and nearly 800 loose cattle. The Great Emigration of 1843 had begun. "The migration of a large body of men, women and children across the continent to Oregon was, in the year 1843, strictly an experiment," Jesse Applegate, the leader of the cow column, wrote.

[USMCBOMBGUY]

Good afternoon Foxhole.
Good read Sam

[Professional Engineer]

On this day...

1991 Professional Engineer achieves Permanent Civilian Status after 7 years, 10 months and 7 days of Zoomie Duty.

[Professional Engineer]

Howdy neighbor

[Wneighbor]

1991 Professional Engineer achieves Permanent Civilian Status after 7 years, 10 months and 7 days of Zoomie Duty.

wow. that was a long time ago! i didn't have gray hair then!

kidding!

Thank you for all that non-civilian duty you had. All the years, months and days of it. :-)

[Professional Engineer]

i didn't have gray hair then!

I didn't either.

I also didn't have a Jr. Engineer in the house.

[Wneighbor]

In this case, I guess we "take the gray with the good!" :-D

[alfa6]

is that an airstream trailer?

Naaah, Airstreams look like this...

:-)

Regards

alfa6 ;>}

[Valin]

1991 Professional Engineer achieves Permanent Civilian Status after 7 years, 10 months and 7 days 16 hours 26 minutes 14.664 seconds...but who's counting.

[Professional Engineer]

The emigrants were sometimes disappointed with South Pass, for this passageway in the Wind River mountains was nothing like the deep gorge they had envisioned.

Me in the Wind River, about 30 miles North of south Pass, August 1997. BTW, I'm sitting at 12,000 feet elevation. The Continental Divide is the little ole ridge behind me.

[SAMWolf]

Except for the tree hugging, bleeding hearts who control the government here, it's a great place. :-)

[SAMWolf]

So where's the helicopter that dropped you off? ;-)

[Professional Engineer]

LOL, no helicopter, but I did see my first UFO. A bright light zipping across the sky making 90 degree turns sorta gets your attention.

I learned later that part of Wyoming has a statistically higher occurance of ball lightning than anyplace else on the great blue-green ball.

[Professional Engineer]

Jolly good tale today, old chap.

Thanks Sam, I haven't read much of this stuff since 4th grade.

[Professional Engineer]

Hi miss Feather

[snippy_about_it]

Your socks are dirty. Did you walk up there?

[Valin]

I don't see a McDonalds. How do you eat?

[Professional Engineer]

Your socks are dirty.

Seven days of walking does that to ya'. Boots woulda been a luxury.

[Professional Engineer]

How do you eat?

Ever eat a pine tree?

[OregonRepublicanLeague]

Great post - We're reproducing a nearly disintegrated text, and came across this Applegate info. -Tony Larson, Oregon Republican League :

Oregon Republican League's "Republican League Register of Oregon", The Register Publishing Company, 1896, page 174-175.

APPLEGATE, E. ROY, of Drain, was born at Yoncalla, Oregon, in 1873, and is a son of D. W. Applegate and a grandson of Jesse Applegate. He was a delegate to the league in 1895 and 1896, and the Douglas County convention in 1896, and is secretary of the club at Drain.

APPLEGATE, HON. JESSE A., of Salem, was born in Missouri in 1835, and came to Oregon in 1843. He was admitted to the far in 1864 at Salem. He was elected Superintendent of Schools in Polk County, and to the legislature in 1864.

APPLEGATE, HON. ELISHA L., of Ashland, is the oldest son of Hon. Lindsay Applegate, and came to Oregon with his parents in 1843. He was one of the founders of the Republican party in Oregon, and was nominated for State Treasurer on the first Republican state ticket, in 1858. He has been a member of the legislature, was a member of the first state central committee, a Presidential Elector in 1880, and frequently a member of state conventions, and for years was an effective campaign speaker.

APPLEGATE, CAPTAIN O. C., of Klamath Falls, is a son of Hon. Lindsay Applegate and native of Oregon. He was captain of a volunteer company during the Modoc war. He has been a Republican all his life, and has continuously been a member of state and county conventions and central committees and delegate to the league conventions. In 1892 he was a delegate to the national convention, and in 1894 a prominent candidate for nomination for the office of Secretary of State. Captain Applegate is now the Republican nominee for Joint Senator for Klamath, lake and Crook Counties.

APPLEGATE, CHARLES, was born in Henry County, Kentucky, January 24, 1806, and died in Yoncalla, Oregon, August 9, 1879. In 1820 he moved with the family to Missouri, and in 1843 came to Oregon. In 1850 he settled in Douglas County, where he resided until the time of his death. He was one of the organizers of the Republican party in Oregon.

APPLEGATE, LINDSAY, was born in Henry County, Kentucky, September 18, 1808. In 1820 the family moved to near St. Louis. At the age of fifteen years he went with General Ashley on a trapping expedition to the Rocky mountains. He also served as a volunteer in the Black Hawk war. In 1843 he crossed the plains to Oregon and settled in Polk County. In 1844 he was a member of the first volunteer company organized to protect settlers from Indians. In 1846 he was one of the fifteen who explored the southern emigrant route through the Modoc country to Fort Hall. In 1848 he raised a company and went with General Joe Lane to capture the deserting regulars. The same year he moved to the Umpqua and served as Indian Agent under General Palmer. In 1853 he raised a company of mounted volunteers and was mastered into the United States service to fight the Rogue river Indians. He was present when the famous Table Rock treaty was made. In 1861 he was captain of a company that guarded the emigrant trail. For quite a number of years he was Special Indian Agent and Sub-Agent at Klamath. In 1869 a military agent was appointed, and three years later the Modoc was broke out. Mr. Applegate was one of the leading pioneer Republicans of Oregon, and helped organize the party in the state. In 1862 he was a member of the legislature from Jackson County.