The Horrors of the Oregon Trail

My book, The Times You Grew Up With, takes you back: https://paulmcallister.store Four hundred thousand emigrants crossed between 1841 and 1869 — out of Independence and St. Joseph, up the Platte, through South Pass, down the Snake. They went for free land: 640 acres under the 1850 Donation Land Claim Act. An outfit cost $800 to $1,200 — wagon, six oxen, a year's flour — and most sold the farm for it. Every family also bought a gun. The gun was the wrong purchase. In twenty years, arrows killed 362 emigrants. Cholera killed thousands, from drinking water the camp ahead had fouled. Wagon wheels killed children. River crossings drowned families. Graves went into the wheel ruts, and the wagons drove over them so wolves could not find them. Twenty to thirty thousand emigrants are buried along that road; a few hundred can still be pointed to. This is the story of the Sager orphans, Martin Ringo's shotgun and Abigail Scott's notebook — and of the cholera the wagons carried into the Native villages along the Platte, which killed far more there than it ever did on the road. Sources: John D. Unruh Jr., "The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60" (University of Illinois Press, 1979) https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p063602 National Park Service, "Death and Danger on the Emigrant Trails" https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/death-on-trails.htm National Park Service, "Cholera: A Trail Epidemic" https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/cholera-a-trail-epidemic.htm KC Clay, "Emigrants and Death along the Overland Trail," 11 December 2014, NPS History Collection https://npshistory.com/publications/emigrants-death-overland-trail.pdf Tom Rea, "The Graves of Martin Ringo and J.P. Parker," WyoHistory.org https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/graves-martin-ringo-and-jp-parker Wikipedia, "Sager orphans" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sager_orphans