It is 10 a.m. on a blisteringly hot September Sunday at Fort Laramie, Wyoming. I am sitting in the shade of some cottonwood trees watching ranger Robert Cuevas as he prepares to cook breakfast over an open fire. Sweating and red-faced in his 19th-century soldier’s thick wool uniform, he explains that the demonstration he is about to give is part of the fort’s living history program. Today’s dish, from an 1879 edition of Manual for Army Cooks, is a hearty breakfast of cornmeal pancakes and salt pork.
Soon the familiar, homey smell of bacon fat is rising into the air. Stretching out beyond the cottonwood trees are the immaculately manicured parade grounds, and past them, neat, whitewashed barracks. It is not that I am disappointed exactly, but I had always imagined something…well, a little edgier. In the mid-19th century, when the U.S. Army first occupied this place, Fort Laramie was the ultimate frontier post. Situated at the westernmost periphery of the Great Plains, and for much of its time the only settlement of its kind for many hundreds, if not thousands, of miles in any direction, it must have seemed, for the soldiers stationed here, like an exile to the very rim of the known world.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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From the 1840s on, the fort was an important way station for emigrants heading west on the Oregon Trail, and this is the reason that I am here. In those days, “Oregon fever,” like gold fever, was a recognized condition, and it seemed I had it too. For years, ever since I’d started researching my book Brave Hearted, about women’s experiences during the westward migrations, I had imagined what it might be like to walk in their footsteps. I had always been particularly intrigued by the first two white women ever to make the overland journey west, the missionaries Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding, but there were many others, too, the vast majority of them “ordinary” women, most of them now long forgotten, whose experiences I had continued to think about, long after the book was finished. In my mind’s eye, I had already traveled with them across 2,200 miles of prairie, mountain, and desert many times, but somehow it was not enough. Their voices echoed in my head: not only those of white and Black Americans but those of Indigenous women, too, whose haunting accounts of the destruction wreaked by the incoming settlers are necessary to any real understanding of this shared history.
Like a phantom limb, the Oregon Trail kept calling me, and so finally, last fall, I set out to experience for myself the ultimate American road trip, and to consider firsthand the legacy left by these pioneers.
I picked up the trail in the town of Fort Laramie, a small, sleepy place trading heavily on its proximity to the historic site. Across from the Fort Laramie Frontier Trading Post, there was a reproduction of the fort (now closed), and down the street stood the Fort Laramie Bar and Grill. Above the window, a sign announced “Welcome, Bikers,” and as if on cue, a posse of half a dozen men on enormous silver Harleys came roaring into town. Later I learned that they represented a chapter of a group from nearby Guernsey and were on a poker run, raising money for their club. Big, bearded guys in leather motorcycle suits, most of them ex-military, en masse they were both intimidating and weirdly sexy, but somehow, on this otherwise lonely, dusty street, like modern avatars of their 19th-century forebears, they fit right in.
Between 1840 and the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1869, as many as a half million people made their way along the Oregon Trail, in search of new land and new lives. Most of them had already been journeying for many weeks before they reached Fort Laramie. From so-called jumping-off places along the Missouri River, they had traveled the first 500 miles across the prairies using the Platte River as their guide. The way thus far had been easy going, with plenty of water and pasture for their livestock. There was much jubilation, and singing around the campfires at night, as though that first part of their journey were nothing more arduous than a Sunday school outing.
As I drove away from Fort Laramie, I thought I knew exactly how they felt. After months of preparation, it was intoxicating to be out on the open road at last. The sky was piercingly blue, flecked with tiny, fluffy white clouds, like something a child might draw. Even the landscape seemed benign. From a distance, these rippling, wide-open prairies looked smooth and soft, so much so that I got out of the car to walk for a while, but I soon gave up. Once a seabed, the ground here was not smooth at all but deeply fissured and cracked, covered in a brittle scrub that crunched under my feet as though I were walking on cinders. It was impossible to imagine walking any distance in these conditions—but almost all the emigrants did, even the tiniest children, although it wore out the leather on their shoes and tore the women’s skirts to shreds.
In 1836, when 28-year-old Narcissa Whitman set out on her mission to Oregon to convert the Cayuse to Christianity, the overland journey to the Pacific Northwest had never before been attempted by a white woman. I found her almost suicidal lack of preparedness (one of her only concessions to the brutal journey had been to procure a pair of men’s boots) both fascinating and dismaying in equal measure. Oregon Country, as the lands beyond the Rocky Mountains were then known, was still disputed territory between Britain and the United States and as yet “belonged” to neither. Narcissa and Eliza (who was 29) and their husbands had needed passports from the U.S. War Department in order to travel to what was then still a foreign land, as alien and unknown as China.
The first leg of the Whitman-Spalding party’s journey took them across the Great Plains, which since the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 had been notionally part of the United States but were then still regarded as Indian Territory. With the exception of a handful of fur traders and trappers, the terrain was still terra incognita to white people. These grasslands were home to some 30 million buffalo, roaming in vast herds up to 100,000 strong, as well as bands of Native Americans—among them the powerful warrior tribes of the Lakota
and Cheyenne—whose ancestral lands they had always been.
When the missionaries passed through here, relations between white people and the Plains tribes were still surprisingly cordial. Trade was both profitable and peaceful, particularly in the area around Fort Laramie, in those days still an important fur-trading stockade (it was not acquired by the military until 1849).
At Fort Laramie, Narcissa would have seen many bands of Native Americans, from many different tribes, who often camped in its vicinity, but her account of her journey is striking in how little mention she makes of Indigenous people, for all her avowed intention of dedicating her life to them. When she does refer to them, they are described as “savages” and “the benighted ones”—almost abstract beings who, to her unfocused gaze, had little, if anything, to do with the flesh-and-blood human individuals she encountered along the way.
I was fascinated, too, by the fact that both Narcissa and Eliza had married men they barely knew in order to fulfill their ambition to become missionaries. In fact, Narcissa had set out on her journey to Oregon the very day after her wedding to Marcus Whitman, a man she had known, in total, for little more than a week, leaving behind everything that was familiar and loved. Both women survived their five-month ordeal, and once the news of their success had filtered back East, it was only a matter of time before not only other women but whole families of land-hungry settlers would follow in their footsteps. Did they, I have always wondered, have any real idea of the consequences of their journey west?
Susan Bordeaux, who grew up near Fort Laramie as the child of a French American fur trader and a Brulé Lakota mother, certainly did. Although she was only a little girl, the devastating effect that the emigrant wagon trains had on the land was seared into her mind. “The waving grass, the sparkling streams, the wooded hills were filled with life-giving foods that the red man appreciated more than gold,” she recalled in With My Own Eyes: A Lakota Woman Tells Her People’s History, a narrative of her experiences based on recordings from the 1930s. At first, the emigrants setting off along the Oregon Trail numbered a few hundred at most, but the discovery of gold in California changed everything. In the spring of 1849, some 30,000 white people made the journey west; the year after, the number almost doubled to around 50,000. These “gold crazed” newcomers came “like a living avalanche,” Bordeaux lamented, “sweeping before it all that the Indian prized.”
GOOD PROSPECTS
As I headed west from Fort Laramie, the Rockies were already visible, blue-gray smudges on the horizon. This section of the trail begins by climbing up toward Casper before swooping down into an immense valley with a distant view of the Medicine Bow Mountains. About an hour beyond Casper, I came to Independence Rock, one of the Oregon Trail’s most famous landmarks and a place where many emigrants stopped to carve their names.
Among the visitors that day were four children slipping and sliding on the steep rock face. A couple standing nearby turned out to be their grandparents. Elder Thornton and Sister Debbie Thornton had spent the summer volunteering at a Latter-Day Saints summer camp at nearby Martin’s Cove. Of the half million emigrants who passed this way, around 70,000 were Mormon converts escaping religious persecution in the East. Among them was Debbie Thornton’s many-times-great-grandmother Susannah Stone Lloyd.
“She was so young, just 25, and unmarried, when she left her hometown of Bristol, in England, to make the journey west,” Thornton told me. Too poor to afford a wagon outfit of her own, Lloyd became one of the many thousands of Mormons known as handcart pioneers: emigrants who walked the entire route pulling their possessions behind them in carts. The group she was assigned to turned out to be the ill-fated Willie Handcart Company of 1856, around 60 of whom died hideously when they became stranded in winter blizzards. Among the dead was a young man named Cox, who had known Lloyd in England and had hoped to marry her if they survived. When Lloyd’s feet became badly frostbitten, she was sure that she was going to die too. In the testament that she wrote later, she describes how, after her sweetheart’s death, she inherited his shoes “and walked into the [Salt Lake] valley wearing them”—a gift from beyond the grave that almost certainly saved her life.
Life-and-death stories such as this are everywhere on the Oregon Trail, and some strange coincidences, too. In the same 1856 handcart group as Lloyd was another English kid, 12-year-old Maximillian Parker, whose family were also Mormon converts. Many years later, Parker had a son, Robert LeRoy Parker—better known today as the outlaw Butch Cassidy.
From Independence Rock, the highway climbs steadily into the very heart of the Rockies. A short detour off the main highway leads to the former mining town of South Pass City. It is highly likely that both Butch Cassidy and his sidekick, the Sundance Kid, once came to this remote spot, perhaps even took refuge here, along with others from the Wild Bunch. The actor Robert Redford certainly believed so. He came here in 1975, following in the footsteps of his film avatar, as part of a National Geographic assignment that became the basis for his book, The Outlaw Trail: A Journey Through Time.
A chain of old bandit hideouts with legendary names such as the Hole-in-the-Wall and Robbers’ Roost, the Outlaw Trail stretches north-south from the Canadian border with Montana all the way to Mexico, intersecting the Oregon Trail almost exactly at South Pass City. The terrain it passes through is so rugged that only the most desperate would attempt it: a lawless area, Redford writes, “where any man with a past or a price on his head was free to roam ‘nameless,’ provided he was good with a gun, fast on a horse, cleverer than the next man, could run as fast as he could cheat, trusted no one, had eyes in the back of his head and a fool’s sense of adventure.”
Today, South Pass City is one of the most perfectly re-created old mining towns you are ever likely to find, and a reminder of just how male most of these early settlements were. While it is easy to imagine Cassidy and Sundance carousing in one of the saloons here—boots on the table, aces in the hole—I have always enjoyed the fact that it is a woman who was South Pass City’s most famous resident.
In 1870, Esther Morris became the first woman in the burgeoning United States to serve as justice of the peace when she was appointed to that office in South Pass City just a few months after women in Wyoming Territory were given the right to vote (also a first for the U.S.). While it is unlikely that a young Butch Cassidy and Justice Morris ever crossed paths, I amused myself by trying to picture what that pillar of respectability might have thought of the polite, baby-faced Mormon lad, perhaps tipping his hat to her and helping her step from the muddy street onto the boardwalk.
Soon I was heading west again, this time into true wilderness. The Rocky Mountains are not a single, contiguous range but a series of ranges, many of them linked by high-altitude plateaus. South Pass itself is just that: a flat, almost featureless 20-mile-wide corridor just south of the Wind River Mountains that is the true gateway to the West.
I never quite got used to these landscapes. Immense, almost horizonless expanses of gray-green sagebrush that yawned before me for hour after hour as I drove: so vast, so timeless, that somehow it would not have been surprising to see pterodactyls flying overhead.
Even in a car, these distances were unnerving. What would it have felt like to have traveled this way on foot? Until I came here and saw this landscape for myself, I never really understood that for the men, women, and children who walked it, the Oregon Trail was not so much a physical journey as a feat of extreme psychological and emotional endurance.
RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY
Long before cowboys and outlaws, even long before emigrants traveling the Oregon Trail, these remote valleys in and around the Wind River Mountains were Shoshone territory. The first white Americans ever to venture this far west, the fur trappers known as mountain men, often intermarried with Shoshone women, and it was in large part thanks to these women’s willingness to do so that the fur trade developed as it did.
In turn, this gave rise to what was surely one of the greatest spectacles in all the West: an extraordinary annual fur trade fair known as the Rendezvous. Between 1825 and 1840, for two weeks each summer, a vast tented city sprang up at a preappointed spot in Shoshone territory, as several hundred mountain men and many thousands of Indigenous people from many different tribes, together with innumerable dogs, horses, and mules, converged to await the arrival of the American Fur Company’s caravan from St. Louis.
In 1836, the year of the Whitman-Spalding mission, the Rendezvous was held along a six-mile stretch of Horse Creek, in the Green River valley, near present-day Daniel, Wyoming. The arrival of that year’s caravan—into what was customarily a wild, whiskey-fueled bacchanal of gambling, music, wrestling, and horse racing—with two prim, young missionary women in tow caused a sensation. Many who witnessed it had never seen a white woman before. Far from being hostile, the atmosphere was jubilant. Believing that the missionaries had come, perhaps not unlike their own medicine men, to share their power with them, hundreds of mounted warriors, whooping and firing off salvos with their guns, circled them in welcome, and when this display came to a halt, the two women found themselves at the center of a fascinated crowd. The Indigenous women’s kisses, in particular, Narcissa later wrote, were “unexpected, and affected me very much.”
It was a moment, it has always seemed to me, of exceptional poignancy. A moment, however fleeting, when there was real optimism and goodwill on both sides, when history hung in the balance, and the vast cultural abyss that in reality lay between them had not yet opened to swallow them all.
THE VIEW FROM HERE
A few days later, I crossed into Idaho. With even a small drop in altitude, the landscape changed with surprising speed into something altogether greener and prettier. Fields of wheat, glowing in the September sun, flowed like golden sea spume up into the very highest necks of the mountains.
Just short of Pocatello, I stopped off at Lava Hot Springs. I found it to be a pleasantly rambunctious holiday destination, full of families who had come to immerse themselves in the town’s public thermal pools. In their accounts of the Oregon Trail, emigrants frequently mentioned this place, little caring that for thousands of years before the arrival of white people, these springs were sacred to the Shoshone and Bannock tribes, who once gathered here to pray and conduct ceremonies in the healing mineral waters.
Not for the first time, it struck me just how rarely—if ever—the Native American perspective of this period of history features along the trail. Pitifully little information is on offer, and it is not always easy to find; it was by the purest chance that I stumbled across the Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Museum. I had driven to the outskirts of Pocatello looking for Fort Hall, a replica of the old fur traders’ stockade that was once one of the most important way stations along the trail, and found instead a modest one-story building. Inside, a small but exquisite collection of tribal artifacts was accompanied by placards describing the familiar sorry stories of land stolen and treaties broken.
If not for the manager, Rosemary Devinney, a cheerful, energetic woman, generous with both her time and her conversation, it might have been a gloomy place. Our talk came around to the importance of language. Devinney speaks Shoshone at home, and, to her great satisfaction, her granddaughter is now learning it in preschool. They practice together as often as they are able. “If the elders of the tribe don’t do something to help out,” she said, “then who will?” But there is hardly anyone left who can speak Bannock: a loss, it seemed to me, that is every bit as great as that of the tribe’s land and its sacred places. Who can say how a people remember their past, or pray to their gods, or even tell stories, in a language that is not their own?
The Bannock and Shoshone tribes were once known collectively by white people as the Snake Indians, and from the Fort Hall Reservation the highway now follows the long, upward curve of the Snake River, all the way to eastern Oregon. On my map, this looked like easy traveling, but in the 19th century, this stretch was the most feared.
Exhausted families would have been traveling for many months at that point, and the Snake River was an unpredictable and often unruly guide: gouging its way through deep canyons, tumbling into boiling cataracts, and bursting into a thousand waterfalls. While the sounds of water were ever present, the river itself would have been frustratingly hard to reach. By midsummer, the ground would have become so parched that barely a blade of grass would be left. Livestock would have died, and emigrants would be choking on clouds of alkali dust so thick they could barely see the horns of their own oxen. If the dust settled, the travelers were tormented by swarms of mosquitoes so dense they looked like a blizzard of whirling black snow.
I drove on to Boise, and from there to Baker City, across a rolling landscape on fire with yellow rudbeckia. From here, the road began its gradual ascent into the Blue Mountains, the last great natural barrier before my journey’s end.
It was toward evening when I came to the crest of the mountains. Of all the places I wanted to see along the Oregon Trail, this was the one I had dreamed about the most. I wanted to stand in the same spot that Narcissa Whitman had almost 200 years previously, looking down at the only place she would ever again call home. For the young missionary, the days of hard riding in the mountains had been the most punishing experience of all (Eliza Spalding had not even attempted it, opting for a slower, easier route), but by the time Narcissa emerged onto the highest pass, she must have known that she had made it.
And now, here I was: gazing down, just as she had done, at the vast expanse of the Columbia River valley spread out beneath me like a map, and at the peaks of Mount Hood and Mount Adams just visible in the hazy sunset. Narcissa had been profoundly affected by this moment, and now I was too. The sweetest moment in a long journey is not when you come to the end but when you know that the end is in sight.
For the next few days, I traveled parallel to the Columbia River. With its long stretches of sinister-looking black basalt cliffs, this unlovely and highly industrialized landscape seemed to be more Mordor than the Promised Land, but as I drew closer to Portland, near where the Oregon Trail traditionally ends, my surroundings began to change. I drove for hours through pine forests where the air was pure and sweet. At other times, there were green pastures and cherry orchards and sunny uplands where sleek, well-fed horses chomped peacefully at juicy grass. There were streams running through meadows, their banks speckled, quite literally, with gold. And suddenly it all made sense. This land, with all its riches, was what it had all been for.
Counting detours, I had driven more than 2,000 winding miles, over three weeks, to achieve my dream, and it felt good. I thought of all the 19th-century settlers who had spent five months or more traveling the entire route to achieve theirs. How had it felt for them when they arrived here at last? Some sick; others starving; many, many of them having buried loved ones along the way.
I thought, too, of their descendants living here today. Men like Earl Bishop, whom I had met a few days earlier when trying my hand at panning for gold in Sumpter, an old mining settlement in the mountains near Baker City. A man of few words and kind eyes, and with an impressive ZZ Top beard, Bishop turned out to be the many-times-great-nephew of Keturah Belknap, an emigrant woman whose beautifully detailed memorandum, written while traveling the Oregon Trail in 1848, had been one of the inspirations for my own book. “They were hardy folk,” he told me, an understatement so magnificent that we both had to smile. His kinswoman Belknap had put it more poetically. “Those wer the days that tryed mens soul and bodys too, and womens constitutions,” she wrote. “They worked the mussel on and it was their to stay.”
Narcissa Whitman’s experiences out West certainly “tryed” her, both body and soul. A woman of both astonishing bravery and profound religious conviction, ultimately she proved unable to connect in any meaningful way with the people she had set out, as she believed, to help. A little more than 10 years after the foundation of their mission at Walla Walla, in eastern Oregon, both Narcissa and her husband, Marcus; four of their adopted children; and an additional five white settlers then staying with them were murdered by a small number of Cayuse tribesmen.
Today, an impressive memorial commemorates this tragic event, but apart from that, there is not much to see at the site of the former mission. In the orchard planted by Narcissa, I picked an apple, and remained there for a while reflecting on the surroundings as dusk fell around me. It was not only Narcissa and her family of whom I was thinking.
From the Cayuse’s point of view, likely nothing but death and destruction followed the arrival of the missionaries in 1836. Within just a few years, a branch of the Oregon Trail passed right by the handsome house the Whitmans built for themselves. Year after year, white settlers arrived in ever-increasing numbers, laying claim to the tribe’s ancestral lands, putting up fences, stealing their water and their pastures. The Cayuse watched as the Whitmans actively helped these newcomers. Then, in 1847, a measles epidemic struck, courtesy of some newly arrived white settlers. About half the tribe died, including almost all of the children. In desperation, the Cayuse elders begged the missionaries to leave, but were ignored. The massacre was a measure not so much of anger as of anguish.
But what had been the work of a handful of renegades sparked the vengeful wrath of white settlers in Walla Walla and beyond. The repercussions of the Whitman Massacre spilled into California, where Indigenous people were treated with genocidal brutality by the Oregonian gold seekers the following year. News of the white people’s slayings even traveled east along the Oregon Trail. “We are having quite a time,” Belknap wrote after encountering a posse of riders galloping to Washington, D.C., for military help. “Some want to turn back and others are telling what they would do in case of an attack.”
From the Whitmans’ orchard, I now saw with clarity the contradictions lying at the heart of Narcissa’s story: her beliefs, her journey along the Oregon Trail, her death at the hands of those she sought to “save.” This little patch of land encapsulated everything that was both glorious and tragic about this chapter in American history. And yet it is a story that has largely been told by a conquering people. What was a personal tragedy for the Whitmans was soon to become a catastrophe of existential proportions for the Cayuse, as the events here marked the beginning of the end of tribal life as they had always known it, a grim pattern that was doomed to be repeated all over the trans-Mississippi West.
As I stood in the garden, a half-eaten apple in my hand, I could not help reflecting on the symbolism of the moment. While the dizzying success of the westward migrations cannot be doubted, it had been achieved at an enormous—perhaps unquantifiable—human cost. I was left with the thought that until more Indigenous voices are raised up along the Oregon Trail, its true history will never be fully told.•
Katie Hickman is a London-based author and historian. Her most recent book is Brave Hearted: The Women of the American West.
