The Oregon Trail's easiest mountain crossing was found by traders detouring on their way home
About 400,000 people followed the 2,170-mile Oregon Trail from the Missouri River to the Pacific Northwest. Its key gap through the Rockies, South Pass, was stumbled on by fur traders carrying news east to John Jacob Astor, then went largely unused for more than a decade.
Thomas Jefferson hoped Lewis and Clark would find an easy water route to the Pacific. Between 1804 and 1806 they did reach the ocean, but their passes through the Rockies, Lemhi and Lolo, were far too rugged for wagons. What they did map were the Platte and Snake river valleys that would later bracket the emigrant road, even though they missed the crucial crossing between them.
Astor's Pacific Fur Company, founded in 1810, filled in the gaps. An overland party under Wilson Price Hunt, steering clear of Blackfoot territory, crossed Union Pass and Teton Pass, tried canoeing the Snake River and gave up amid canyons and rapids. Returning east with dispatches, Robert Stuart's small group swung south and found South Pass, a broad, gentle saddle over the Continental Divide, wintered on the North Platte in 1812 to 1813 and reached St. Louis that spring. Stuart's careful journals showed a wagon road was feasible, but the War of 1812 left it idle.
For roughly three decades Britain held the upper hand. After a forced merger in 1821, the Hudson's Bay Company dominated what Americans called Oregon Country, and its new Fort Vancouver, built in 1825 on the Columbia, became the region's commercial hub. Around 1840 its manager oversaw 34 outposts and about 600 employees. That manager, John McLoughlin, officially discouraged settlers yet lent exhausted American arrivals food, seed and credit, and was later called the Father of Oregon.
The first emigrant wagon train left Independence, Missouri, in 1836, when wagons could get as far as Fort Hall in Idaho. Clearing continued until the road reached the Willamette Valley. Traffic peaked between 1846 and 1869, with Mormon and California travellers sharing the eastern stretch, and faded once the first transcontinental railroad opened in 1869. Interstate 80 and Interstate 84 now shadow parts of the route.
Source: Oregon Trail
