Hitch Your Wagon to This Oregon Trail Quiz

Devil’s Gate is a 370-foot-deep, 1,500-foot-long cleft in granite formed by the Sweetwater River in Wyoming. The pass was too narrow for wagons to travel beside the river, so the actual Oregon Trail mostly had to detour around the landmark. However, Devil’s Gate was a popular stop for hiking, and many travelers carved their names into the stone.

Chimney Rock reaches 325 feet high at its peak, and is located in Nebraska’s panhandle. For settlers on the Oregon Trail intending to follow it to its westernmost point, Chimney Rock served as a natural checkpoint indicating that the first — and easiest — third of the trip was over. Chimney Rock is classified as a hoodoo, or a vertical pile of rock that was formed partly by volcanic ash.

One issue with the original “Oregon Trail” computer game is how it ignores Indigenous peoples who were already living in the region. Dr. Elizabeth LaPensée led a team of Indigenous game designers to rectify that oversight in a game called “When Rivers Were Trails,” which won the Adaptation Award at IndieCade 2019. The computer game follows an Anishinaabeg in the 1890s going from Minnesota to California.

“Peppard’s Folly” is an achievement in the Oregon Trail video game, and it refers to the ambitious but not terribly safe vehicle invented by Samuel Peppard. To speed up travel across the windy plains, Peppard attached a sail to a wagon, and dubbed it a “wind schooner.”

The Oregon territory was claimed by several countries in the first half of the 1800s before being ceded to America by Great Britain in an agreement overseen by President James K. Polk. Before that, Spain, Great Britain, the United States, and Russia had all laid claim to the territory. Britain based its claim on explorer James Cook’s exploration of the Columbia River in the late 18th century, while the U.S. claim was based on Lewis and Clark’s expedition in the early 19th century.

The 128-foot-tall Independence Rock in Wyoming became known as the “Great Register of the Desert” because of all the travelers who carved their names and other messages onto it. Sometimes the messages would include tips about the route, but frequently the rock functioned like a guest book. Register Cliff and Names Hill were two other popular rock-based message boards in Wyoming.

For various reasons, like con men pressuring travelers into buying too many provisions, the Oregon Trail quickly became littered with discarded supplies. Fort Laramie in Wyoming was a popular checkpoint that eventually earned the nickname “Camp Sacrifice” for the number of goods left behind. For example, the Gold Rush of 1849 led to 20,000 pounds of bacon being dropped outside Fort Laramie’s walls.

The lands west of the Rocky Mountains were held mostly by members of the Shoshone and Bannock tribes. It was a Lemhi Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, who helped guide Lewis and Clark on their famed expedition to the West from 1803 to 1805.

After traveling to Missouri from their homes farther east, prospective settlers arrived in the town of Independence to make their final preparations for the departure on the Oregon Trail. The town was a hive of activity, with merchants selling everything from wagons and horses to food and supplies for the months-long journey ahead.

The trek along the Oregon Trail was dangerous, and thousands risked their lives to settle the western frontier in the first half of the 19th century. In time, travel became easier as technologies such as bridges and ferries made their way west. Eventually, the expansion of railroads made the trail obsolete, allowing travelers a safer, more comfortable ride west. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869.

In the early 19th century, merchants, fur trappers, and other explorers traveled along what became the Oregon Trail, but it wasn’t until the 1840s that significant westward travel began. In 1843, missionary Marcus Whitman led a group of around 1,000 pioneers in what became known as the Great Emigration.

Travel along the Oregon Trail was extremely difficult, and roughly one out of every 10 travelers who started out did not survive the journey. If you played the popular computer game “Oregon Trail,” you know that diseases including smallpox, influenza, and gastrointestinal ailments like cholera and dysentery were common causes of death.

Because of the need to make it through the mountainous western region of the trail, which was covered in snow by the fall, most travelers left Missouri in April or May. It took them four to five months to travel roughly 2,000 miles, averaging 15 to 20 miles per day.

On July 5, 1843, the Organic Act was passed by a provisional government in Oregon, and even though the region also included British and Canadian settlers, the entire 12-man government was made up of Americans. To attract more Americans and solidify their claim on Oregon, the act offered 320 acres to American men and 640 acres to married American couples. While the act also banned slavery in Oregon, the land offer was available only to white people.

Forget the fleet of large boat-shaped Conestoga wagons often used in Hollywood films depicting travel to the West. Smaller wagons, nicknamed “prairie schooners” because their covers looked like ship sails, were much more common along the Oregon Trail. These wagons could carry at least one ton of supplies and could even be prepped to float across rivers and streams.

The primary Oregon Trail began in eastern Missouri, then passed through Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. Although there were additional offshoots that travelers could take to other destinations, the main route did not pass through Montana.

Oregon was not actually the most popular endpoint for travelers of the Oregon Trail. Of the estimated 400,000 migrants to make the trek, only about 80,000 ended up in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Many others made permanent homes in Wyoming and Idaho along the way, and an estimated 250,000 splintered off and down the California Trail to settle in the Golden State.

Many travelers used the Oregon Trail for religious purposes, including missionaries and those seeking a place to freely practice their religions. This included tens of thousands of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons, who escaped persecution in the East and traveled to Utah, founding a settlement at what is now Salt Lake City.

When gold was discovered in 1848 at Sutter’s Mill, California, near San Francisco, the world was gripped by gold fever. Some 250,000 prospectors traveled to the Golden State during the era known as the California Gold Rush. Many of them used the Oregon Trail to venture west to seek their fortunes, leading to heavy travel along the route.