by Jesse Wiley
You will need 200 pounds of food per person for the journey, mainly flour, bacon, sugar, cornmeal, fat, beans, rice, vinegar, baking soda, and citric acid. Don’t forget essential building, farming, and wagon-repair tools. You should also take camping gear such as a tent, bedding, kitchen utensils, matches, and candles, as well as useful things such as rope, a pail, a rifle for hunting wild game, animal traps, and a first-aid kit.
Clothing should be woolen and shoes sturdy. Keep a bandanna in your pocket. Take buckskin for repairing shoes. Avoid the temptation to take luxury items, such as fancy foods, furniture, or nice clothes. Finally, it’s important to buy a team of six healthy oxen to pull your wagon. They’re slow animals, but they’re reliable.
Join a
Wagon Train
Pioneers will band together into wagon “trains,” which are groups of wagons traveling together. Smaller groups are more manageable than large groups. The advantages of wagon trains include safety in numbers, helping each other with skills, and hunting together.
Wagon trains vote for a captain. His job is to decide when the wagons start in the morning, when they finish at night, and when to stop for lunch. He also assigns guards and decides what order the wagons travel in. No one wants to always travel at the end, breathing in the dust from the other wagons, so you will all take turns.
Go West
Choose the best time of the year to start your journey. If you start the Trail too early in the spring, there will not be enough grass for your oxen to graze. Leave too late and you risk reaching the mountains during the winter. Always move quickly, and try not to take shortcuts. Stick to the Trail!
Your days will start as early as four in the morning, with breakfast, chores, and loading your wagon. A bugle at seven means it’s time to start the day’s journey.
The wagon train will roll along until six p.m., except for an hour’s lunch and rest time, called “nooning.”
At the end of the day, you will unload your wagon, set up camp, take care of your livestock, and cook dinner. If you can’t find firewood, you can burn buffalo-poop patties called “buffalo chips.” Sometimes you sing or tell stories around the campfire. Everyone goes to sleep early, because it’s hard work being a pioneer.
Challenges!
CROSSING RIVERS
You will have to cross rivers on the Oregon Trail. If they are shallow enough to ford, you can seal cracks in the wagons and drive your animal teams across. If the current is strong, it’s best to cross diagonally.
ILLNESSES
Illnesses like cholera and dysentery are common on the Trail. No one understood germs in 1850, so one in ten travelers died. Try to keep your food and water clean, and if you get sick, rest and drink boiled liquids.
DESCENDING STEEP HILLS
When going down steep hills, lock the wheels of the wagon with ropes, chains, or built-in brakes. Then use your human strength or ropes to lower the wagon down the hill slowly. Be careful!
WEATHER
You will face extreme weather like rain, hail, snow, and heat during your trip. Besides staying safe, the next most important thing is keeping your wagon intact and your oxen healthy. Don’t let the wagon wheels get stuck in mud.
ANIMALS
Keep your eyes open for wolves, black bears, prairie dogs, coyotes, and buffalo along the Trail. Some animals are shy, and you will seldom see them.
If you get bitten by a poisonous snake, stay still to prevent the venom from spreading. Trying to suck out the venom won’t help. Grizzly bears are rare, but if you encounter one up close, don’t run! Instead act unafraid and be non-threatening.
Finding Your Way
In 1850, once you leave Missouri, there aren’t roads or inns or restaurants or even states yet. The United States is made up of thirty states back East, but out West, you’ll have to cross territories and Native American lands by using a compass, and by looking for famous landmarks.
The Trail itself is occasionally hard to see. Sometimes you can follow the tracks, called “ruts,” left by other wagon trains. Other times those ruts might lead to abandoned forts or empty trading posts.
Look for these landmarks between Missouri and Chimney Rock
DISTANCE FROM INDEPENDENCE, MISSOURI:
PAPAN’S FERRY: 88 miles (142 km)
ALCOVE SPRING: 165 miles (266 km)
FORT KEARNY: 319 miles (513 km)
ASH HOLLOW: 505 miles (813 km)
COURTHOUSE ROCK & JAIL ROCK: 561 miles (903 km)
CHIMNEY ROCK: 575 miles (925 km)
You hear the familiar blare of the morning bugle, which stirs you from a deep slumber.
“How can it be time to wake up already?” Samuel moans loudly.
“I feel like I just went to sleep,” adds Hannah.
You tug a feather from your sleeping mat and tickle Hannah’s nose. Your little sister sneezes as your kid brother giggles and rolls away. Samuel hurries out of the tent to avoid being tickled, too.
Your whole family is awake now, though it’s barely light outside. You all know the routine. You’ll help Ma build a fire to cook breakfast, while Pa takes down the tent and repacks your covered wagon. Samuel will milk the cow, and Hannah will help fill the heavy iron kettle with water for coffee.
“May I have another johnnycake?” you ask Ma when everyone sits around the campfire to eat. You’re extra hungry since you didn’t want much supper last night, and you know you have a long day of hiking beside the wagon ahead of you.
“Of course,” says Ma, as she slides another patty onto your tin plate, along with a chunk of bacon. You sigh as you bite into the salty cured meat. You’ve been eating bacon almost every day for six weeks now. It used to be one of your favorite foods before your family started traveling along the Oregon Trail, but now you wish for a fresh tomato or a fried egg. Ma has noticed that you’ve been avoiding bacon lately, and she encourages you to eat it.
“You need to eat for strength, my love,” she tells you with a smile.
You glance at the sunburned faces of your family and realize you must look the same as they do. You’ve traveled almost six hundred miles since you left Independence, Missouri, back in May.
The journey has been long, with fifteen miles of walking every day. You’ve learned to live with the pain of the blisters on your feet and the ache in your legs. The wagon is too full of stuff for you to ride in, so there’s no choice but to keep hiking day after day.
The trip has been exciting, too. So far your wagon train has mostly crossed flat plains, but you’ve also seen some huge rock formations and gorgeous waterfalls. You’ve met Native American people from the Osage and Otoe-Missouria tribes, and even been face-to-face with a grizzly bear! The bear was more excitement than you wanted. Best of all, you’ve made friends with other kids in your wagon train. Eliza and Joseph, whose father Caleb is the wagon train captain, have been the most fun.
“Roll the wagons!” Caleb shouts.
You scramble to wipe your plate clean. Hannah runs to place the dishes in the wagon, while Ma throws dirt on the fire to put it out.
The first of the wagons starts to move, and Pa drives your oxen team to the middle of the line. You’re glad you’re not at the end today, where the dust from the other ten wagons is the worst. Sometimes it’s so thick, you cough for hours.
It’s a clear day, and you can still see Chimney Rock in the distance behind you. The tall, pointy rock is just as impressive as the first time you spotted it, several days ago. Your family had a good time camping at its base, and you carved your name on the rock, like other pioneers did before you.
Best of all, Pa used his skills as a carpenter to build things for others on the Trail in exchange for a cow, which Hannah named Daisy. Now your wagon train has three cows, which provide fresh milk. Even better, Ma hung a small container of milk on the wagon yesterday. All the shaking and bumping of the wagon turned it into creamy butter, a real treat on your johnnycakes this morning.
“Guess what’s coming up ahead?” Jo
seph says, as he falls into step next to you. You know that the mountainous part of the Trail is beginning, and you’ve been on the lookout for the next landmark.
“Scotts Bluff,” you reply knowingly, since you’ve been studying Pa’s guidebook.
“That’s right,” Joseph says. “But do you know how it got its name?”
“How?” you ask. Joseph is always full of information. When you first met him, you thought he was a know-it-all, so you didn’t really like him. But you soon realized that he isn’t a show-off. He’s just really smart and helpful, and he likes to share what he knows.
“Scotts Bluff was named for Hiram Scott, a fur trapper,” Joseph tells you.
“So?” you say. You know that fur trappers make money by trapping animals and selling their skins.
“Well, Scott got really sick out in the wilderness, and the other trappers he was with thought that since he was about to die anyway, they could just leave him alone and continue their trip without him. That was sixty miles from the bluff,” Joseph says.
You shiver, remembering how you’ve passed lots of graves along the Trail. You know that the risks of your travels include disease and death, but it’s something you don’t let yourself think about too much.
Joseph continues: “Scott didn’t die where the trappers left him, and he crawled all the way to the bluff. His bones were found there months later. That’s why Scotts Bluff is named after him.”
You stop for a minute, and make a face as you imagine that terrible journey.
“What does Scotts Bluff look like?”
“I don’t know,” replies Joseph. “But I heard it’s not easy to get through.”
That night, as you lay in your tent, you think about the scary story Joseph told you. You shiver under your warm blanket, grateful for the sounds of Samuel and Hannah’s breathing beside you, because it soothes you to sleep.
The next afternoon, you see steep cliffs rising above the plains, and you know you have almost reached Scotts Bluff.
Caleb calls a wagon train meeting when you halt for the afternoon break. You listen quietly and chew on a piece of buffalo jerky, while the grown-ups talk.
“We have a choice,” explains Caleb. “Either we try a shortcut through a gap in the cliffs, or we go the steadier, longer way around them.”
“What is the disadvantage to going around them?” Pa asks.
“We’d lose a few days,” says Caleb.
“And if we go through?” Ma asks.
“We should be able to make it in a day, but the route is dangerous and unknown. There is no map.”
Everyone starts to debate. You’ve been rushing to try to get to Independence Rock for the big Fourth of July celebration, and no one wants to delay. But will traveling through the bluffs be too difficult?
What do you decide to do?
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