William L. Lang

Video Interpretations of the Oregon Trail The Oregon Trail Mike Trinklein The Roads Less Traveled Shine/Velasco Productions

A CENTURY and a half ago, more than one thousand emigrants hitched wagons to oxen, mules, or horses and began one of the most storied treks in American history, the two-thousand-plus-mile crossing of the Oregon Trail. Leaving the Missouri River at one of several points in present-day Missouri and Iowa, land-hungry migrants traveled west along the Platte River, crossed South Pass in Wyoming, cut northwest to the Snake River plains, then followed that river to the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon across the Columbia Plateau to the Great River of the West and the final leg to their destination in the verdant Willamette Valley. Their wagons rolled west in great numbers for more than two decades-some estimates count as many as 100,000 for the 1843-1860 period-and as late as the early twentieth century emigrants still used the trail. The Oregon Trail is a regional and national icon. It symbolizes a compelling and well-known patriotic story that headlines the non-Indian settlement in the American West, the wresting of the Pacific Northwest from Great Britain, the conquest of a reluctant environment, and the establishment of civilization in the wilderness. It is a very familiar story, one desperately in need of major revision. It needs revision, not only because it has