In Search of the Oregon Trail Part I: That Great Waste Wild

Major funding for this program has been provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the annual financial support from viewers like you. The Meyer memorial trust of Portland Oregon and the Bureau of Land Management. United States Department of the interior. With additional funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities the child's foundation the Hillman Foundation and the Templeton Foundation. This is the Oregon Trail [ Traffic...trucks honking] And so is this [crickets ] and this [ birds and crickets] and this [ crickets] but even more than places, the Oregon Trail is the story of people. People like Amelia Stewart Knight.

As a younger woman in 1853 with her husband and seven children she walked from her home in Monroe County, Iowa two thousand miles across the continent to a new life in Oregon. It's also the story of people like Alvah Unthank, who carved his name at Register Cliff on his way to the Goldfields of California. And it's the story of Brigham Young, who found freedom from persecution for his Mormon followers in the isolated sanctuary of Utah. Together with the stories of hundreds of thousands of their fellow emigrants these journeys over the plains, deserts, and mountains became one of the most powerful and enduring symbols in American history. But just as importantly the Oregon Trail is the story of the people the emigrants met on the way.

The Native American tribes whose homelands lay in the path of the migration. In this century, a pervasive myth has grown and overshadowed the truth of the Oregon Trail experience. Through the popular media, the complexity of that experience has been reduced to one dimensional heroes and villains. In reality, there was adventure and danger but the challenge for us today is to see beyond Hollywood's fictions. Another myth is that this is a story that came to a conclusion over a century ago. In true, there is no end in sight. Many of the issues that shaped the past and the forces that motivated the Overland travelers are still with us. Like those who set off before, we head out in search of the Oregon Trail and what it tells us about our

country and ourselves. [Music] [music] [music... carriage moving along] Most Americans believe they know the story. In the middle of the last century, Intrepid pioneer families set out from the Missouri River on an overland journey of 2000 miles across the plains, deserts, and mountains to the Far West. Banded together in long caravans for protection. Their possessions in covered wagons. The pioneers faced incredible hardship and danger. Even Indian attack. Progress was slow.

The weak turned back. Many died.But most endured and succeeded, arriving destitute but hopeful in the promised land of Oregon. Through their efforts the United States became a nation which spanned the continent. Told in this simple way. It's an epic story almost biblical in proportion and in fact much of it is true. [speaker] The overland trail is all about the significance of the frontier in American history and that significance I think is a series of paradoxes. Our wanderlust as a people and on the other hand our need for community, our love of nature and our desperate need to develop

our fascination with Native people and the Wars of dispossession that made this country. Those are the elements of our real history and those are the elements that we'll need to confront,to construct our new national myths. [ Richard White] It's easy to see the appeal of the older Oregon stories what they are is about small groups of people of tremendous courage enduring great hardship to move into an Eden that was awaiting them in which they then made into this... this welcoming civilized country. And it's not so much that there is a harm in that particular story as much as that story erases a whole bunch of other stories, a whole bunch of stories that I think have to matter to us a great deal as a nation. One of the things that that story wipes out is the story of the people who lived here already.

[Rick Williams] You know today we talk about drive-by shootings, well I think that's where you see the first earliest drive-by shootings in America was along the trail. You have Europeans coming by and... and shooting at Indian people in their own land. You know. Talk about unwelcome guests! [ Susan] Because it is so symbolic, It's important to see the Oregon Trail experience as it really was, to strip away the myths that, for example make the Native Americans much more dangerous than they were for most of the time. And indeed, to strip away the myths that make the whole experience much more adventurous enough in a film-like way and it really was. It's important to see real people in their daily lives because that's our true history. [Music] To search for the truth of Oregon Trail is to travel many different ways

both literally and intellectually. At the most basic level, It's seeking out the actual route of the trail. Today only the most isolated stretches look as they did in the 1840s. The land has changed. There are trees where none stood 150 years ago. Irrigated crops growing places once too dry to farm. Interstate highways connect modern cities and areas once considered a great desert. Original accurate images of the old Oregon Trail are rare. Because the migration reached its peak in the mid 19th century, most of the trail experience was not photographed. Only after the Civil War did photographers become common in the American West. By then, traffic on the trail had slowed to a trickle.

What we have are the sketches and notebooks left by the emigrants. Few of them were competent artists. Those who were, tended to concentrate on the notable geographic features. So it's possible to find dozens of sketches of a place like chimney rock, but there are very few pictures of typical camp life. In the very early trail years, several professional artists went west. Alfred Jacob Miller traveled with the fur trade caravan. Karl Bodmer wanted to capture an accurate view of the plains Indians. George Katlin had similar goals. Their paintings depict the way of life on the verge of enormous change. Later many artists would portray the Oregon Trail as a noble undertaking.

Suffused with golden light and laced with exhilarating adventure. These images have become icons of American history and helped to create the myth. [music]. Few of them depict the reality. [music]. To get closer to that reality. We have to rely on the written diaries and reminiscences of the travelers. Official Records popular guide books of the time, and the oral history passed down from generation to generation of Native Americans. Even these records are subject to broad interpretation. Simple facts, such as the estimate of how many went west vary between 250,000 to half a million people. Yet for all these difficulties, once we begin to travel the trail, to seek out the stories of the people who lived it,

what's revealed is a fascinating and complex chapter of our history. The Oregon Trail begins on the banks of the Missouri River in the heart of what is now metropolitan Kansas City. In the early 19th century this was called Westport Landing. Every spring for three decades, beginning in the 1840's, river towns like Westport, Independence, and St. Joseph competed to be the jumping off point. There was big money to be made. It was here that the emigrants purchased whatever supplies they hadn't brought with them from home. Most of the emigrants were practical minded farming people. No purchase

was taken lightly. Because space in the wagons was precious, every item had to serve a purpose. [speaker] "What the guidebooks told them and what the people who had the very earliest people told them was that it was just like home except better. And that's what they wanted to recreate. And the women....and I am sure the man as well, tried to think of everything they would need to take with them, both in a practical sense and in a personal sense. Bibles and medical guides and women's sewing supplies and fabric, as well as grandmothers' quilts, and China that have been in the family for a long time.... and mementos that have personal meaning. It's quite an undertaking, you're trying to pack not just for a six or seven month trip in terms of the food and whatever the family will need in terms of bedding and clothing for that.

But. For what you need at the other end. [Narrator] At the peak of the migration there were at least a dozen different guidebooks, some more factual than others. [speaker] For provisions for each person. You want a barrel of flour. Our hundred and pound ship biscuit is [inaudible] dried, 150 to 180 pounds of bacon, 25 pounds of coffee, 40 pounds of sugar, 25 pounds of rice, Sixty pounds of beans or peas, keg of clear cooked beef suet, lard, 30 to 40 pounds dried peaches or apples, and also some molasses and vinegar. [speaker] Vast majority of overland emigrants came from the adjacent states to the so-called jumping off spots. They came from Illinois, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa. Certainly there were people from further distances. But by and large they were Midwesterners. They were also movers. Most of them had moved at least once some

three four and five times. And they were middling folk and they weren't wealthy although it was impossible to take the trip without some store of capital required 500 to 1000 dollars to move a family of four across the trail. [music] [Narrator] Raising and spending five hundred to one thousand dollars to make a move was a significant risk in the 1840s. Most emigrants were third and fourth generation Americans, farming people living on the western fringes of a shaky American economy. [speaker] There was a worldwide depression in the 1830s and the 1840s. And it affected the United States in the Panic of 1837. Foreign prices collapsed, mortgages were called in, people lost their farm,

and the federal government had a fire sale to public land. The unclaimed lands were bought up by speculators who were no longer eligible for squatting. So, by the early 1840s, people were really feeling the pinch. [speaker] Always driving migration in the United States -- this just is true of the 1840s, 1830s, and 1820s -- is the size of families. American farm families want to secure land for their children. To secure land for your children, it's best to go where land is cheap. It's always cheaper further west. But that just raises the question again, why this far west. Why coming all the way to Oregon.... and that's always going to be the question that haunts historians, because at the basic level the migration to Oregon made no sense. It was not a purely rational decision. [Narrator ] The path was dictated by geography, destination, and

necessity. The train had to be near. Good water grass and fuel for cooking and warmth. As the emigrants leave the Missouri, they cross the prairie, following first to Kansas. Then the Blue Rivers through what today are the states of Kansas and Nebraska. [birds chirping, music]. Timing is critical. The overland voyage of 2000 miles takes about six months. They must leave late enough in the spring for the forage grass to have grown. [suspenseful music plays]. But not so late as to get trapped in the early fall snows of the western mountains. That's what happened to the Donner party in the winter of 1846. The lurid saga of death and cannibalism was just one of the stories that fueled the emigrant's anxieties. [suspenseful music transitions to gentle guitar playing]. When all is ready, early in May, they set out on what they expect to be the

great adventure of their lives. The excitement of beginning, mixed with the fear of the unknown, and for almost everyone, the sadness of leaving family and friends they might never see again. [speaker] We intend, tomorrow, to enter that great waste while that now lies west of us. I have seen many go out. And I have seen no countenance free from evidences of strong emotion. [music, sound of wagon] These people knew that they're about to undergo an experience very different than anything they've undergone before and the experience isn't just for those people who moved before. There are people who are born in movement but this migration this migration of across 2000 miles is something different. And the best sign we have that they regard it as something different is that they commemorate it. An unusual number of them kept diaries. Not only did they keep diaries, but later on when they give the stories of their

lives, these are the things that lingered in their mind. This is the moment almost that we were most alive. This is the moment that when I look back matters and is the most significant. [person reading diary] April 10th: this day we started on our overland journey to Oregon. We were the first to leave camp in the morning about 9 a.m. We stopped at St.. Joe until 2 p.m. when we left for old Fort Kearney, where we expect to cross the Missouri. We drove about seven mile and in camp for the wet rainy afternoon. There were five messes of us, eight wagons and three families with children. [speaker] People wrote faithfully in their little three by five diaries every night. Some of those are almost unreadable now because they're in pencil and it's blurred and they're very -- they're very-- exciting to look at in a personal sense because you have a feeling you're right they're sitting in a wagon as

someone is writing it out every night. [music, sound of campfire] [speaker: journal entry] Each advanced step carried us farther and farther from civilization into a desolate barbarous country. But our new home life beyond all of this was a shining beacon that beckoned us on inspiring our hearts with hope and courage. I can only hope that we will get through safely and was much gratified that we were at length enroute. our watch word? Westward Ho. [conductor sound] To people who make their living from the land, the planes and mountains of the American West are a vast wasteland unsuited to their needs. Even dangerous. But to the tribal people who live here,

this is a nurturing environment, a great mother. Much of the tragedy of the Oregon Trail stems from this profound misunderstanding. [speaker] Most migrants set off from Missouri, Really did think of themselves as moving off into the wilderness....and by the wilderness they think they thought about it, that would have meant untouched land, on land shaped by human beings. But of course most of the area they were covering was nothing of the sort.... that Indian peoples had used and shaped this land for centuries indeed for millennia. They checked it through fire that they determined where trees would grow and where they wouldn't grow along the plat. They determined when grasses came up because they burned to bring up early grasses in the spring. They of course had planted crops over much of this region. They shaped entire landscapes. [speaker] It's connected to the word bewildered. Wilderness is a place where somebody feels bewildered and the place that makes one person feel bewildered can be the place where thousands of other people

consider it home, consider familiar, know where they are... But I guess I would say don't take away the bewildered person's experience. So, on behalf of white folks thinking they were entering the wilderness. They were bewildered and they have a right to put on record their bewilderment. They do not have a right to say that it was a vacancy or that no significant human presence was there. [speaker] This was not a wilderness. They were well established trails. There were regular campgrounds that Indian people use on a regular basis. The idea that they're coming into an uninhabited wilderness was totally a misperception. In fact I think that maybe it was used to justify that invasion. [Narrator] The Oregon Trail emigrants aren't the first Americans to think of the West as a wilderness. [trumpet music plays]

In 1804, President Thomas Jefferson authorizes the first official American expedition across the continent to the Pacific coast. It will be an advance reconnaissance for the coming invasion. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark travel for more than two and a half years following Jefferson's orders to discover the soil and face of the country. The trip takes on added urgency with news of the Louisiana Purchase. For 15 million dollars, the nation doubles in size. Franz's Napoleon Bonaparte sells the United States the right to govern nearly a million square miles of Western land, Indian land. A right assumed without regard to the people living there. [music plays] Later the US government makes treaties with these Native American tribes as though they are sovereign

independent nations. But in 1804, the agreement is with the French colonizers. In the Louisiana Purchase, Native American rights -- legal or otherwise -- are not a consideration. [speaker] We are now about to penetrate a country at least 2000 miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man has never trodden. [music, drums, birds chirping] [speaker] The notion of "civilized" is rooted in this concept of duality where there's two types of people. One is the civilized man. The other is the uncivilized man and the Europeans of course consider themselves as being civilized and they considered others who did not have Christian values as being uncivilized. The notion is that the people living there are not using the land as God had intended.

Therefore those people who lived righteously in God's way had a right to take over that land and appropriate it for their own use. And if they were civilized, then they had a greater right to do so. Partially what they're doing is ignorance. Part of it is this incredible cultural arrogance where civilized becomes a term of Honor which is reserved only for Europeans and their descendants. [speaker] There have been Indian people there for thousands and thousands of years. There's also been French people, British people, Russians. If you go to the Northwest, you find a Aleuts from Alaska, you find Hawaiians, Spanish in the Southwest. There's tons of people coming into the West from all over. [Narrator] When Lewis and Clark crossed the Continental Divide, they are no longer in Louisiana Purchase territory. Across the Rockies, or lands claim by the British, the Oregon country.

What the explorers find here stirs their imaginations and for decades to come wets an American hunger for land. [birds chirping] [speaker] William Clark has is quite an excellent cartographer and the Lewis and Clark maps are extremely detailed. After the expedition Clark is appointed first the governor of Missouri territory and then the superintendent of Indian Affairs. He has an office in St. Louis and on the wall of that office he has an enormous map. It starts with the Lewis and Clark map, which he draws on the expedition. But every subsequent expedition -- Stephen Long, Zebulon Pike -- information gets filled onto that map. And it's not only government information, it's also corporate information from trapping companies, and individual private information from individual trappers and traders who are out there in the region, the landscape. That map in that office is the place where the most comprehensive knowledge of the West is gathered and it's knowledge that it's under government control. [music plays] Through their published memoirs and journals, Lewis and Clark and other government

sponsored adventurers greatly expand 19th century American knowledge of the New Territories. Legendary military explorers Stephen A. Long, Zebulon Pike, and John Charles Fremont quickly become national heroes to a literate and curious younger generation of Americans. [Speaker] The European discovers the New World, and like Adam, moves through it, bestowing names on the animals and the places. This is the Colonial fantasy, the fantasy of discovery, of exploration. To cast one's self in that role. Is the -- the ultimate privilege of the conqueror, of the colonialist. This, I think, was something that the Overland experience offered to ordinary people. It was their chance to participate in this great colonial adventure, to be explorers

themselves. To become the knight errants of the West. [music ends, sounds of wagons creaking] [Narrator] After a short time, the thrill of beginning fades and the emigrants settled into their new routines. For the next few months, the prairie will be their home. [music plays, birds chirp] [Speaker reading] The prairie, oh the broad, the beautiful, the bounding, rolling prairie. All the extravagant descriptions of foreign scenery I have read would not seem extravagant here. Imagine the ocean when the waves are rolling, mountains high becoming solid and covered with beautiful green grass. And you have some faint idea of it. Could Eden have been more beautiful? [sound of thunder]

[Narrator] For every poetic diary entry, there are dozens which speak only of weather and travel conditions in a series of long monotonous days. Men are temporarily relieved of their farm chores. But there is plenty of hard physical work with wagons and animals to make up for it. [speaker] Most of the wagons came from the farm. They were constructed at home, a minimum load for a family of four would have been about two tons, which is the carrying capacity of a wagon. That does not include any of their tools or furniture. There are plenty of records of people setting out, with four or five in the party, in nothing more than a 15-foot farm wagon. These people would have had to overload the wagon and probably dump much of their cargo along the way. [music plays]

[Narrator] After the first few year,s emigrant's rarely travel in organized wagon trains. Independent-minded farmers resist taking orders. Most travel west in small groups of family and friends. [music, sound of wagon] People seldom ride in the wagons. They are too heavy and take up useful space. In the muggy June heat, oxen prove their worth over horses and mules. [speaker] Oxen endure the fatigue and heat much better. They do not travel far from the encampment. They are not liable to be stolen by the Indians who are aware that they travel so extremely slowly that it would be impossible for them to drive them so far during the night that they could not be re-taken during the next day. [music] [Narrator] For the next five to six months, day in and day out, the routine is the same.

Up early and walk, walk, and walk. On a good day the emigrants could expect to make 15 to 20 miles. This is a way of really knowing the world and experiencing the natural world through work, through labor, through this kind of bodily knowledge. It's something that has vanished from us. These are working people. These are people who are in intimate contact with the natural world, and what they think about is how far you walk during the day. What it's like to walk over, what kind of shape the animals are in. They think about the effort of moving through space, not as we do when we drive along the trail, but the effort to put one foot in front of the other, the sweat, the tiredness, the way you ache at the end of the day, the way that you long for sleep even during a noon day stop. Everyone gets up in the morning at some impossible hour like 4 o'clock or something like that, and while the men are gathering together stock and hitching up the wagons,

the women are putting away all of the nighttime stuff, getting the children rounded up, getting everybody fed, getting breakfast made, and getting everything ready to roll. And then as the train moves out, after breakfast and travels for four or five hours until the noontime stop, the women are keeping track of where the children are, and try to make sure that they're not wandering off or in danger. Chad had a very narrow escape from being run over. Just as we were all getting ready to start, Chad the open rascal, came around the forward wheel to get into the wagon. And at that moment the cattle started and he fell under the wagon. Somehow he kept from under the wheels. I never was so much frightened in my life. There were innumerable jobs collecting fuel, tending stock, watching

fires cooking, the children dead, and probably even more importantly, they were responsible for watching their younger sibs. Then in fact it was the youngest children on the trail who were probably at the greatest risk because without jobs to do they tended to run alongside, to get into trouble, tended to get run over by wagons, bitten by snakes, drown in rivers. So in some ways the youngest children without responsible working those were the ones who had the greatest difficulty. Almost it is travel every day. Although the more observant keep the Sabbath than rest on Sundays. From sun up to sundown the only break is the noontime meal. The noontime stop was usually pretty brief and women didn't cook that meal. They fed their families cold food which they had prepared the night before. And then the wagon train starts up again, travels for another five or six

hours until they find the spot where they're going to spend the night, which is typically a spot that has both wood and water and enough room for everyone. And it's at that point, after the men have unhitched the wagons and turn the stock loose, that the men who've been driving and droving all day long, can finally relax for a while. But it's precisely that point that the women have got to swing into full scale activity, because they have to make dinner over an open fire, in whatever conditions they find, whatever the wood situation is. And so, typically you find women working together in groups, men working together in groups, except for a few hours after dinner. That's the only time that husbands and wives for example and families have to spend together. As the emigrants cross the open prairies of Kansas and Nebraska, they feel

exposed and on edge. They know they're at the mercy of the weather, that accidents could happen working with animals some heavy wagons. And then, there is the specter of disease. Fully half of the deaths happened between 1850 and 52, when cholera erupts in the overcrowded conditions of the gold rush and Mormon migrations. But in most years the death rate on the trail is about the same as or even a little lower than the rest of the nation. Still, most of those who die are young people. By our standards the trail is dangerous. By 19th century standards? No, the trail is only mildly dangerous. It's a kind of journey in which many of the people who died, died by accidents and some of the accidents, it's so ridiculous that they sometimes seem to be this kind of genetic selection. When you put a loaded gun in a wagon

and you have the barrel facing outward and the wagon is bumping and you try to grab the gun and take it out with the barrel pointing to you it might be just as well for the success of the whole party that you are eliminated right there. More emigrants die from accidental gunshot wounds than from Indian attacks. [gun shot] A significant portion of the money allotted for the trip is spent on firearms. Many men harbored frontiersmen fantasies inspired by the Western explorers, Daniel Boone or James Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking. Although every farm family certainly had their hunting rifle, most of these men had not had the opportunity to hunt. And for them the chance to move out into the great American West across the Overland Trail opened this wonderful opportunity to play this historic role to become Leather-Stocking, to become Boone,

to hunt the buffalo, and to see the Indians. By the late 1840s, increasing traffic and hunting are driving the bison away from the trail. When you read the accounts of men, they are obsessed with finding Buffalo. The vast majority are disappointed in their hopes. They see not a single buffalo. For those trains that encounter buffalo, generally there is a stampede not of the buffalo, but of men, out onto the prairie to hunt them. By and large this was a chance to participate in a fantasy. It had very little practical implication. There is irony and humor in the image of trigger happy would be Daniel Boones racing around the prairie.

But it isn't humorous to people who depend on the buffalo for everything. People like the Pawnees. For centuries, the Pawnees located their earth large towns and farms near their hunting territory along the Platte River. Late in the 1840s, as traffic increases with the Mormon and California migrations, the Pawnees have to cope with the devastation caused by wave after wave of nomadic white people. One of the first things they did upon seeing buffalo, was to organize parties and go slaughter as many as they could in U.S. society. It was perhaps a rite of passage for the young man to kill buffalo. They tended to kill as many buffalo as they could, scatter the herds.

The buffalo were considered to have been given to the Pawnee by the creator and therefore was a sacred animal. The Pawnees needed buffalo for their ceremonies. There was a great deal of religious significance and preparation that went into the hunts. It was very important for them to conduct these ceremonies or in the Pawnee concept of things, some tragedy would befall the world and the Pawnee people. Just as today's farm economy in Kansas and Nebraska relies on corn and cattle, the Pawnees depend on corn and buffalo. It's a centuries old way of life. Nebraska is the ancestral homeland of the Pawnee people. I am a member of the Pawnee tribe and our people have been here

I guess not since time immemorial but for a substantial amount of time. They were established there before Coronado went to the Great Plains in the early 1540s. The Pawnees believed that they own the buffalo and that through the buffalo they own the land. The land that the buffalo ran over was the ground that the Pawnees owned. Platte River Valley was the center of Pawnee culture. Overlanders kill buffalo, destroy forage and bring disease. And they refuse to acknowledge that the Pawnee have a right to expect anything in return. The conflict is in large part due to white attitudes. An image of Native Americans has been forged from the folklore surrounding the earlier Indian wars back East.

People coming across the Oregon Trail...the people making the decision to migrate to Oregon, are by and large people who have had no immediate experience with Indians. They'd heard stories about Indians. They'd heard stories from their parents, they'd heard stories from their grandparents. They're going to be surrounded by symbols, by pictures, by paintings, by cheap woodcuts which very often would produce this experience of Indian attack. We tend to think of emigrants as being these sort of poor, illiterate backwoodsman and not really the case. I mean they're reading things like James Fenimore Cooper. There's in the 1820s and 30s there's a resurgence of older captivity narratives Puritan and Pilgrim sorts of stories about being hauled off into the wilderness taking prisoner by savage Indians and sort of being forced to undergo all sorts of abominations. There's a sense that Indians are holding the land captive in a similar manner to the way that they, one might say they had held white women captive, white children captive. These are the sorts of attitudes that the people who will

become the emigrants on the Oregon Trail are growing up with. And as they move out their attitudes are going to be what you predict they would be. They're well armed. They're wary of Indians. They distrust Indians and they are never have any doubt of their right to displace Indians. It just never occurs to them that there can be a moral question involved in most of this. And what's odd about all this is here is the people who are occupying a continent who are displacing Indians but who tend at all times to create an image that they're the ones being attacked. They're the ones under siege. And so what you have is these uneasy encounters all up and down the Oregon Trail as in fact they will move through Pawnee country and they don't hesitate to let their animals graze in Pawnee cornfields. I mean they'll destroy Indian corn crops in the way they'd never allow their animals to do that. If that was a white farming community. I think there'd been very difficult for white American at that time to comprehend exactly what the buffalo meant to the Pawnees

what the sacred corn meant to Pawnees and how their incursions into the Great Plains were disrupting Pawnee life and to try to compensate for this, the Pawnees would sometimes congregated at river crossings and ask for a twenty five cent toll per wagon to cross, sometimes 50 cent toll if the wagons people refused to pay the Pawnees would sometimes follow that party for several days and take livestock that belong to those people sometimes it would plunge the wagons. Yesterday the word was that we must travel today because we were in the Pawnee country and it would not be safe to lie still. About 200 Pawnees came here three days ago and are lying here with us but with what intentions. We know not. They will almost steal a horse from under his rider. We are not afraid of our lives but we

find them very annoying. The Pawnee Indians are the greatest thieves I ever saw. The best way I think to civilize or Christianize Indians is what power and land. Given the mindset of the emigrants and the amount of damage sustained by the Pawnees it's not surprising that sometimes violence does erupt. But contrary to popular mythology these events are rare. The Hollywood version would have immediate gunfire, immediate violence. The fascinating thing is that that was not the reality that the reality is a lot of peaceable interchanges. Not necessarily wonderfully friendly, sometimes really quite apprehensive on both sides. But much more interesting

than the Hollywood version. White men who were prepared to defend themselves and thought that they would have to fight their way across the continent often discover that that's not at all what they have to do. The more typical encounter is Indian people -- curious Indian people coming into camp and asking for something, asking for food, asking for coffee, asking for some physical artifact and whites puzzled by how to handle that. What, will it get out of control? Are these bad Indians about to become thieves? So it's usually a fairly congenial meeting but with undertones of suspicion and distrust. The fate of the Pawnees is tied to the fate of the buffalo. The Oregon Trail is the beginning of the end for the American bison. The great herd is split into two by the traffic along the plant. Then through commercial hunting, the animal is quickly eliminated from the Great Plains.

From a population once numbered in the millions by 1890 the bison is reduced to a few hundred animals. [Music] For the Pawnees, the Oregon Trail brings disease, starvation, and despair. In 1876 the Pawnees reluctantly give up their homelands and are moved south to a reservation in Oklahoma's Indian territory. At the beginning of the trail the Pawnees were a powerful group in the region but still they did not have the strength to stop the traffic. So some expected, I think, a catastrophe to happen as a result of the destruction of the buffalo herds and I think to a large degree we did see that happen. The Pawnees number's diminish very dramatically reaching a

low point around the turn of the century. A little over 600 people. [Music] The Platte River that the emigrants follow through Pawnee country and beyond is a godsend. Braided, sandy, full of silt, and just three miles wide in some places. Too thick to drink, went the joke, too thin to plow. But broad, flat, and unnavigable as it may have been, the Platte's abundant water, grass, and gentle terrain are the keys to crossing the continent. The great news about the American continent is that it has East to West running rivers where you need them. If you're trying to get from the Midwest to Oregon. So the Platte

River for instance is an enormously important gift of Providence to Overland travelers you can go river by river and you never have more than 50 or 60 miles of waterless crossing and without that it's Australia. Modern highway builders continue to recognize the logic of following the Platte. In many places the actual trail ruts are paved over with Interstate 80. By mid-June the emigrants are passing out of the prairie and into an area of sparse rain, few trees, and short grass west of the one hundredth meridian. The early 19th century explorers had labeled this region a great desert. Today with irrigation it's good growing country. Some of the emigrants see a potential here but they don't consider settling. It is against the law. Until the mid 1850s this is

still officially Indian territory. The description of this country is generally embodied in the pithy expression 'It can never be settled.' The plain truth is it is the most splendid country in the world. But, without timber. When the Overland Trail began in the 1840s the general impression was that the prairie lands were not suitable for farming. The idea was that where there were no trees there could be no agriculture. But as we move into the 1850s and 1860s in fact people are. Settling in Iowa and Nebraska and taking up land. In fact, the number of people who went Overland to the far west is a relatively small number compared to the number of people who made farms in the Midwest at the same time.

Perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand people went to the Pacific coast and during that same quarter century several million settled the states of the great Midwest. The emigrants pass the forks of the Platte and ford the South Platte. Then it is a dry stretch north across the high table land towards Windless Hill. Here the deep ruts formed by hundreds of thousands of wagon wheels are still visible. This is one of the few segments of the original trail remaining in the Great Plains. Up ahead in the North Platte Valley the first of the spectacular monuments of the American West begin to appear on the horizon. Almost everyone, men and women, commented on the famous

milestones. All the really dramatic pieces of Western landscape and then occasionally you get women with a finer eye who look at the land and what's growing on it and wonder about it. Side Chimney rock. It is a curiosity indeed. A rock, or rather a hard clay, standing alone, towering in the air. Perhaps 300 feet. All of the lofty rocks along here are composed of the same material. This, in my opinion, had once been a sea. The landmarks indicated our progress and helped to break the monotony. Like the milestones along the journey of life, there was one less to pass.

They have now been traveling almost two months. The Plains portion of their journey is ending. They are headed toward the mountains. [Music] The emigrants continue west through the Mitchell Pass at Scottsbluff. Ahead is territory claimed by tribes very different from the Pawnees. These nomadic bison hunters are themselves relative newcomers to the Great Plains. These are the Lakota Sioux and their allies the Cheyenne. The emigrants coming across a trail, you know, their whole image from from what they've learned about in the east is that there are Indians out there and they don't distinguish between the Pawnee or the OTO or the Iowa or the Sac and the Fox, or the further west you go

to the Lakotas and the Dakotas and the Nakotas and the Cheyennes and the Shoshones and the Crows. They're all Indians. And yet each one of these tribes are distinct separate sovereign nations and all of them at one time or another were present along the trail. You may develop a relationship with the Pawnees and say, 'Hey, we got a good relationship with the Indians,' you know, and go 25 miles and encounter more Indians and you think you've got a good relationship with them but they're not Pawnees. They're another tribe. In today's world. The Lakotas have come to embody the classic image of the American Indian. These are the people of the teepee and the war bonnet, the mounted warriors of the plains riding at top speed through herds of stampeding bison. These are the warriors that will bring down Custer and inspire generations of

painters, novelists, and filmmakers first to vilify and later to lionize them. The complex American relationship with the Lakotas begins on the trail. They look quite intelligent for Indians and superior to what I had expected to see. Some of them are now practicing with their bow and arrows for the amusement of the emigrants. These Platte Sioux, by the way, are the best Indians on the prairies. Look at their conduct during the past summer. Of the Western immigration which rode through their country this year, not a person was molested, not an article stolen. Such good conduct deserves reward. By the mid-nineteenth century, most of the Northern Plains is controlled by the Lakota Sioux and their allies. As with so many other Native American tribes, fur trappers and traders are the

first European-Americans to interact with the Lakotas. Many marry Lakota women and are adopted into the tribe. You had this wonderful growing symbiotic relationship between the fur traders, the Indians. It was generally a positive interaction. It was an exchange of cultures, it was an exchange ideas, there's an exchange of trade goods. And as early as 1825 the relationship appears to be a good relationship. You don't see very much hostility. It was almost like a paradise. And that changed and I think it began to change in about 1840 when you see this greater influx of movement along the trail more people coming. They began to ruin paradise. The Lakota are really an expanding empire on the plains. They move out from Minnesota, they move to the Black Hills, they move south in to Nebraska, west into Wyoming. They're taking

territory constantly from other tribes. And when they hit the Platte they bump into a rival empire: the United States. The Easterners coming across, the Europeans coming across a trail could be easily intimidated by the savages because of the stereotypes that they have in their mind, 'Well they're going to kill us if we don't kill them'. And so when they come to us and they say you know 'we want something,' you know we better give it to them. And so you know you see Indian people taking advantage of that too. When you think of these people the Lakotas sweeping down out of the hills you know a lot of these guys were very very large guys. You know they're painted they've got long hair they're on their ponies you know and they're very tough customers sweeping down to a wagon train. Well, I think for a lot of Overlanders, they were scared to death when they see something like that. As with the Pawnees, the Lakotas insist on some kind of toll for

passage. But the Lakotas are more openly aggressive. Some Overlanders complain to the government. One of the things that the government did was it would take individual Indian leaders and take them back to Washington on the train and they would have to pass through Chicago and Cincinnati and all kinds of towns and they would see just how populous United States was and they would come back to their people and often times they would say 'look, there's no way we can fight these people. We have to figure out some way to accommodate, to figure out some way to get along.' 1851. A great Treaty Council is called at Fort Laramie, near today's Nebraska-Wyoming border. Members of eight major plains Indian nations attend. Many of whom are traditional enemies. Whenever 10,000 arrive the council must be moved from the ford to a place where there's enough grass for all the

horses. Here at Horse Creek, the United States attempts to set tribal land boundaries. What the government's doing is constructing a mental map of the region, of saying the 'Lakota are going to be here, the Shoshone are going to be here, the Pawnee are going to be here.' And in theory then, those tribes know what their boundaries are and they're not going to be engaging in intertribal warfare which the government sees as something that bleeds into the trail and creates a lot of problems for emigrants. The second thing that the Treaty of 1851 does, is it allows the government a right of way for the road and for government military posts. Negotiating a treaty provides a legal basis for the events which have already occurred. The trail has been in use for over a decade. The Army has already bought or built forts. With the increased traffic from the migrations, not only to Oregon but also to California and Utah,

tensions escalate. Many Lakotas are opposed to the rigid boundaries dictated by the government. You have split the country and I don't like it. What we live upon, we hunt for and we hunt from the Platte to the Arkansas, and from here up to the Red Beaut, and the Sweetwater. These lands once belonged to the Kiawah and the Crows. But we, the Oglalas, Cheyennes and Arapahoes whipped these nations out of them. And in this, we do what the white men do when they want the lands of the Indians. In the end, the tribes sign the treaty and pledge to remain at peace. To compensate for the loss of game and other damages, the tribes are promised annual payments of food clothing and trade goods. Today's legacy of reservations and government payments to the tribes of the Great Plains

originates with the Horse Creek treaty. They were acting in the best interest of Americans coming across the plains and they needed to keep that trail open. In fact there was a lot of deceit on the part of the United States government to keep the trails open. They would make promises that there was no way that they could keep. First of all the area was too immense to even try to do some of the things that they suggested in the Treaty of 1851. For a few years the trail remains relatively peaceful. Then in August of 1854, in Wyoming near the original treaty site, a band of Lakotas is camped waiting for their annual treaty provisions, already several months overdue. Where these irrigated fields of sugar beets now stand, a stray cow belonging to a Mormon immigrant wanders into the Lakota camp.

It is shot and butchered. The cow's owner complains to the military at Fort Laramie. The Lakota leader offers horses in exchange for the cow. But the Mormon is not satisfied. A group of 29 soldiers under a brash young lieutenant named John Gratton is sent to arrest the Lakotah responsible. The leader of the Sioux people who were there, just by the nature of his responsibilities in that tribe, is not going to let that happen. I mean, if he let that happen that would diminish his significance as a leader in those people. And so he offers a number of different compromises and none of them are satisfactory to Gratton and the military, and they turn around and a gunfight starts, somebody gets shot, and Gratton, his men are all killed.

[Music] Fearing reprisals, the Lakotas flee. But incidents of violence increase. The Army sends word that any Lakotas found north of the North Platte are to be considered hostile. Here in the valley of Blue Water Creek, a few miles north of the North Platte, in August of 1855, Brigadier General William S. Harney surprises a Lakota camp led by Little Thunder. The army kills more than 130--mostly women and children--and imprisons many of the survivors. He was going to teach these Indians a lesson. In fact, Harney was trying to make that point. I'm going to you know teach these people a lesson. You know you'll never going to forget. Well we and the Indian people didn't forget it. And from that point on and

I don't believe that there was this positive interactive relationship that had been existing prior to that ever existed again. It was truly a hostile environment. The 1851 treaty. The Mormon Cow Incident. And Harney's retaliation at Blue Water set the stage for decades of struggle between the army and the Lakotas for control of the northern plains. That armed conflict will continue until 1890 with the slaughter at Wounded Knee. The site of Fort Laramie up ahead means that the Overlanders have reached an

important milestone. Very few change their minds and turned back after passing this fort. The easy part of the trip is over. From now on, each mile will come at a greater price. During the late 1840s and early 1850s as tensions with the tribes increased, the government built or took over a number of forts along the trail. Some, like Laramie, were originally fur trade posts. Like many others, Laramie is situated near a trade route where tribal people have gathered for centuries. The Overlanders see the fort not only as a place of protection, but as a post office, general store, hospital, and repair shop. Nothing remains of the original fort. These buildings replaced it in the 1870s. Today, they are a monument to the federal government's role in the development of the

West. The image we have of this migration, which makes it a sort of folk migration, a migration which breaks free from the country and ventures out into the unknown. But in fact when you look closely, that's not exactly what's happening here. That as the settlers begin to move West relatively quickly, the federal government is going to intervene in dramatic ways in the journey. The U.S. military before the Civil War is small, that of that miniscule military, 90 percent of it is stationed out along the Western trails to protect emigrants from Indians. But more than that, government expeditions are going to be dispatched into the West, which essentially are going to create roadmaps, instruction manuals for how to make the journey. The first and most important of these government manuals is a report by the swashbuckling Army Pathfinder John Charles Fremont. Fremont would go on to become the Republican Party's first presidential nominee in

1856--four years before Lincoln. His ambitions are aided by his powerful father-in-law--U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Fremont was in charge of the topographical Corp's exploration of the far West in 1843. And he, actually his wife--Jesse Benton Fremont--wrote his report and it became the first government report to become a best seller in American history and many of the overland emigrants learned about Oregon and the far West by reading this government report. And actually many took it with them as a guidebook. Fremont as an explorer was pretty much a mixed lot. I mean he had a real talent for leading his men into places that they couldn't get out of, of getting lost in mountains in winter storms, of having people resort to cannibalism. These are usually not the kinds of things that make your reputation as an explorer. But they're kinds of things that could fade away

when Jesse Fremont wrote the reports. There's no question again that men as well as women felt fear in going on the Overland Trail, and all of those people took some comfort in knowing that someone had gone there before them and gone there so confidently and so masterfully. And that's the real magic of a Fremont sentence, is never a moment's doubt, lack of confidence. He uses the verb 'I determined' over and over again. He doesn't just do something, it's always announced with that 'I determined to go here,' 'I determined to do that'. So it is a celebration of the American will. The plains are vast, the mountains are high. The American will is more vast, capable of greater heights. So I think the Bible and the reports of John C. Fremont were the most frequently carried texts. We had accomplished an object of laudable ambition and beyond the strict order of our instructions we had climbed our loftiest

peak of the Rocky Mountains and look down upon the snow a thousand feet below and stand in where no human foot had stood before felt the exaltation of first explorers. Fremont was mistaken on at least one count. The Peak he climbed was not the highest in the Rockies. As the emigrants push farther up the North Platte, many begin to realize that their true enemies are not the Native Americans, but time and geography. They skirt North of the Laramie mountains, the first true mountains they've seen. Here the rugged landscape of the American West begins to assert itself.

The trail is determined as much by where it can't go as where it can. Soon the Overlanders pass Register Cliff. Many pause to carve their names and the year of their journey. Each inscription represents an individual's pride and hope. Alva Unthank. A teenage boy from Wayne County Indiana. Traveling with friends and relatives to the California gold fields. They stop here on June 23rd, 1850. A short distance from Register Cliff, the trail narrows as it climbs out of the river valley to cross limestone hills. Tens of thousands of wagon wheels leave an indelible record of their passing. To the West, the land begins to rise. The vegetation changes, and

the soil thins to rock and sand. Here, in the Wyoming desert, five days after leaving his name at Register Cliff, young Alva Unthank is stricken with cholera. The next day, from their camp on the North Platte, Alva's friend Pewsey Graves writes, "Late by today to doctor and nurse Alva. June 30: Alva gettin' worse. It's quite hopeless. Complaining none. July 1: Alva rapidly sinking. July 2: In the early morning, Alva died. Alva laid calm, bore his suffering patiently, and uttered not a murmur or a

groan. It is father to be of good cheer. His child has paid the great debt of nature. We cured a large, neat headstone. Salomon Woody carved the inscription." There are a number of diaries in which literally, day by day, women noted the number of graves that they passed and you find these dreadful diaries that say 'passed ten graves today, passed five graves today, passed fifteen graves today' and there's a tremendous amount of concern about safely burying someone who dies. And the greatest expressed concern is of having to bury someone along the trail and never be able to come back to that grave again.

Alva is buried at noon and the party reluctantly moves on, leaving him alone in the desert. Today, the massive Glen Rock power plant on the North Platte keeps a vigil over Alba Unthanks grave. It seems to me that the uncertainty of the journey was enormous and it would be the worst form of hindsight to look back and say well nearly all of them survived. Some people did die. They were passing enormous tests of the will over and over and over again. And to see such continued acts of determination should be of some value greater than just saying it went on a long trip. Most of them survived. Where's the drama. It seems to me that one ought to appreciate the toughness of the soul

Overland travelers demonstrated. The emigrants continue up the North Platte a few miles, to the site of present day Casper, Wyoming. Nearby, the North Platte turned South into rugged, impassable canyons. At Bessemer bend, they look back on the North Platte for the last time. This river has seen them through a third of their journey. Ahead is a grueling 50 miles across a waterless stretch to the Sweetwater river. Drinking water is in short supply. The streams and lakes are bitter with alkaline.

No water should be used for drinking or cooking, nor allowed to cattle, unless in a running stream or containing insects. Otherwise it's probably alkaline. The bad water kills cattle and sickens the travelers. Painful bouts of diarrhea called 'the relax' are a source of embarrassing discomfort in the wide open spaces. The Devil's Backbone, where tribal people captured eagles for sacred feathers. Ancient petroglyphs mark the site. Emigrants leave their names here too. Just ahead is the aptly named Sweetwater River, the lifeline that will take them to the crest of the Rockies. Many stop at Independence Rock. Another famous landmark.

The first party which noticed this singular rock was a party of American trappers who chanced to pass that way upon the Fourth of July. When wishing to be Americans even in that secluded region of Aboriginal barbarism, they proceeded to celebrate that great day which gave birth to human liberty. The emigrants know if they arrive at this granite dome by Fourth of July, they should reach Oregon's Willamette Valley before the snow makes the mountains impassable. Near here, the Sweetwater cuts through a wall of solid granite: the Devil's Gate. The other thing about the geography is how much the Overland travelers related to it, responded to it. That they had a sense of wonder, a sense of beauty

that precedes the Sierra Club by forty or more years in that, but there's no question in my mind that a lot of the diaries show nature loving long before that was an official American cultural movement. This is one of the greatest among the many curiosities of nature. The river here runs through perpendicular rocks about 300 feet high in a channel from 50 to 80 feet wide. These rocks are granite also. Upon looking at this, it would seem that it had been made expressly for that purpose, by the blowing and blasting of many months. But not so. It is the great, the wondrous work of nature. Farther up the Sweetwater, the emigrants pass Split Rock. Another well known landmark.

And then they look before them and see the wind river chain of the Rockies, rising like an impenetrable wall. Crossing the Continental Divide is perhaps the biggest surprise of the entire journey. The way through the Rockies is not big trouble, but remarkably simple. The South Pass is what makes the entire undertaking possible. It is called the South Pass because it is south of Lewis and Clark's pass. It crosses the continental divide on a gentle saddle of land at an altitude of only seventy six hundred feet. Beginning near the source of the Sweetwater, this pass had long been known to the tribes of the region who used it as a hunting and trading trail.

That knowledge was passed on to American fur traders like William Henry Ashley. In 1823, Ashley for the first time, begins to move goods across the plains and into the mountains, and in 1830 does that by wagon. And it's almost immediately noted by newspaper editors that this offers the possibility of a family migration across the continent, and then with Fremont's report in 1843, it seems to be proven that Overland migration can be undertaken by anyone. From the impression on my mind, I should compare the elevation we surmounted immediately at the pass to the ascent of that Capitol Hill from the avenue at Washington. We could hardly realize that we were crossing the great backbone of the North American

continent. The ascent was so smooth and gentle, and the level ground at the summit so much like a prairie region, that it was not easy to tell when we had reached the exact line of the divide. But it is here, after every shower, the little rivulets separate, some to flow into the Atlantic and the others into the Pacific. Crossing the continental divide has seemed effortless, but there is no doubt about its significance. For now the Overlanders have entered that vast region of the West known as the Oregon country. They have reached the halfway point. People saw themselves as following in the footsteps, or if you will, the wagon ruts of their parents and grandparents. They saw this as their own version of the Great Migration. Now, there had been many great

migrations in American history. The Puritans coming to America, they called it the Great Migration. The movement across the Appalachians into Kentucky and Tennessee during the revolution, people called that the Great Migration. The movement into the Midwest in the 1820s, again was called the Great Migration. This was their version of the Great Migration. But for the most part the diarists are too preoccupied with the day to day, with the monotony, with the work, with the hardship, to care about the role they were playing in American history. For the 19th century tribal people, the passing of the Western migration takes only a few weeks each spring or summer. But it signals enormous changes that could not have been imagined by their parents or grandparents.

Even today the consequences of the Oregon Trail continue to reverberate in the hearts and minds of these Americans. For Indian people, the legacy of the Oregon Trail is two things. One, that we're no longer there and the buffalo are no longer there, and Interstate 80's there. I think those two things, every time you travel Interstate 80 you think 'well this is here because the Oregon Trail came across here and we'll never be here again.' You know, our people are never going to pick choke cherries along the river again. Our people are never going to wade through that river. Our people are never going to experience the beauty of that area of our country in that personal sense and that personal being part of the sacred Mother Earth in that area. It's gone. Few of the emigrants give much thought to the effects left in the wake of their

passing. The most difficult part of the journey is still before them. Their thoughts are on the future, on the work to come. Here I am on the Rocky Mountains. Who would have believed one year ago that I would ever be here? I sometimes think it must be a dream from which I will soon awaken and find myself at home. Still, I'm glad I came. And the hope of doing well in Oregon is as strong as ever within me. [Music] [Music] Stay tuned for the conclusion of "In Search of the Oregon Trail." We'll explore the California Gold Rush, the Mormon Migration, the conflict with the British over the Oregon country,

the end of the journey, and the creation of the Oregon Trail myth. In search of the Oregon Trail will continue after these messages. To learn more about the Oregon Trail visit PBS online at the Internet address on your screen. In "Search of the Oregon Trail" is available as a two part video cassette for $39.95 plus shipping and handling. Call 1-800-228- 4630. To place your order.