SCOTTSBLUFF, Neb. ‒ Johnny and Vicki Blevins stepped out of their pickup and gazed down at the thin ribbon of the old Oregon Trail below them.
Over the course of several decades, perhaps as many as 500,000 migrants walked and rode along this risky route from “civilization” west to the fertile lands of Oregon and the gold fields of California, or sought religious freedom in Utah. Thousands died along the way.
And although the worn-in tracks of the route are slowly fading into the landscape, the journey it represents still looms large in our collective consciousness. Johnny Blevins, a retired North Carolina pastor with a deep love of history, has always wondered if he would have been bold enough to try it himself.
On a recent cross-country drive to visit Yellowstone National Park, the Blevins’ stopped by Scotts Bluff to consider those travelers who came before them. Enjoying their comfortable retirement after raising kids, the Blevins’ doubt they would have had the courage to sell everything they owned to seek a better life thousands of miles from home.
“Would I have done it?” Johnny Blevins asked aloud as he looked down, marveling at the landscape. “I don’t think so.”
When it was all over, those who had traveled the Oregon Trail west represented more than 1% of the country’s entire population, in one of the largest voluntary mass migrations in human history. And it helped define who we are as Americans. Even today, hundreds of high school and college teams call themselves “Pioneers.”
To mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, USA TODAY dispatched reporters to follow iconic American journeys ‒ some happy, some tragic ‒ that helped shape this country.
Reporters retraced parts of the Oregon Trail, panned for gold in California and followed the myths and realities of Paul Revere’s 1775 ride from Boston as the Redcoats moved in, among other travels that still resonate today.
We will explore more American journeys over the next year as the nation marks 250 years since its official birth.
Our reporting here and in the stories to come shed light on the tales we as a country tell and teach as we consider what the next 250 years may bring. And it comes as the Trump administration has launched an effort across national parks, museums, libraries and classrooms to reconsider exactly whose voices should be highlighted and whose quieted in the telling of our uniquely American story.
A nation on the move
In her Oregon Trail diary of 1851, pioneer Eugenia Zieber recorded looking out upon Scotts Bluff 63,605 days before the Blevins visited.
Passing through the newly opened route between the bluffs ‒ an earlier route took travelers further from the North Platte River ‒ Zieber, 18, recorded an approaching storm.
Travelers on the Oregon Trail used several types of wagons during their westward journey in the 1850s, carrying all their worldly possessions on the arduous journey through the Rocky Mountains. This display at Scotts Bluff National Monument in Gering, Neb., highlights some of the wagons, which are lined up along the route of the old trail.
“A dark cloud hung over the bluffs, increasing or heightening the grandeur of their appearance to a great degree,” Zieber wrote in her trail diary, as recounted by Albert Belanger in his 2011 book “On the Oregon Trail in 1851. “We gazed upon it in perfect delight, but suddenly the whole scene was enveloped in darkness, completely hid from our view.”
After graduating from a finishing school in the East, Zieber traveled with family members from Maryland in search of healthier living conditions in Oregon.
Like most people who headed west on the trail, the Ziebers joined a larger group for safety during the five-month journey, their oxen plodding six days a week. They rested on the Sabbath.
Travelers followed the North Platte for hundreds of meandering miles, depending on the water for both people and livestock, and the grasses growing alongside for feed.
Walking westward ‒ most everyone on the trail walked ‒ the pioneers were headed to new opportunities: land, work and wealth. Fleeing crowded Eastern cities, Americans sought to better their lives and, in the process, transformed the young nation. Many migrants were themselves recent descendants of European settlers who had journeyed to the United States in the previous decades.
The evening light highlights the rock formation of Scotts Bluff National Monument in Gering, Nebraska, along with a display of the different kinds of wagons used by travelers on the trail during the 1850s.
Those who made the journey west irrevocably changed the landscape as they turned over virgin earth with their plows, grazed their cattle on lands then roamed by buffalo, and forcibly displaced Native Americans who had lived there for centuries. They chopped down trees for railroad ties, dammed rivers for irrigation ‒ and laid the foundation for Earth’s most powerful nation.
And while we tend to think such mass migrations are over, modern-day population shifts from the northeast, Rust Belt, and more recently, California, to states like Texas, Arizona and Florida, show we are still a nation on the move.
America’s population mobility has little equal on the world stage, as people continue seeking more affordable housing, better weather and new job opportunities. Experts say our relentless moves are driven in part by the fact that this nation of immigrants is less tied to a specific community than are people elsewhere.
“We got blowed out in Oklahoma.” Oklahoma share-croppers family in a car loaded with people, their belongings and supplies near Bakersfield, Calif. Apr. 7, 1935.
Today, demographic experts say there’s a growing migration trend driven by climate change, with people leaving hurricane-prone coastal states like Florida and Texas, the heat of Arizona and the wildfires across the west. While still small, that climate-driven migration to the Rust Belt appears poised to once again reshape America, as did the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and even 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.
“I don’t think people self-identify as climate refugees,” said Jeremy Porter, a sociology professor at the City University of New York and a senior lecturer in demographics at Columbia University. “I think when people leave, they associate it with the cost of insurance and they’re moving to reduce costs.”
Wolves, stampedes, storms and death ever-present on the trail
Used for years by trappers and traders following game trails and Native American routes, the Oregon Trail as we know it was primarily active from about 1836 until the transcontinental railroad linked the coasts in 1869. Tens of thousands died making the journey west, often from now-easily treatable illnesses, infections and broken bones. The vast majority of travelers were white, although some wealthier families brought along their slaves.
Reenactors and volunteers work together to pitch a tent at the Fort Laramie station at the Oregon Trail Live event on Sept. 9, 2017 at the Willamette Heritage Center.
While most schoolchildren learn about the Oregon Trail, historians say there was no single route, and no single destination. Instead, what we call the Oregon Trail is shorthand for the multiple routes, cutoffs, shortcuts and varying destinations of those leaving behind the existing United States. California became a state in 1850, and Wyoming and Nebraska formally joined the Union only after migrants mostly stopped using the trail.
An estimated 500,000 pioneers braved the Oregon Trail, seeking a better life in the West.
In many ways, the Zeiber family’s journey mirrored the challenging experiences of many of the trail’s migrants: from livestock stampedes to illnesses like cholera and dysentery (the gastrointestinal illlness now known to many Americans from the “Oregon Trail” video game). Wolves howled outside their nightly camps. Storms appeared without warning. Native Americans, angry at the invasion, threatened violence.
Diaries kept by Eugenia Zieber describe the privations of the trail, chief among them the frequent deaths of fellow travelers.
David Wolf, the executive director of the Legacy of the Plains Museum in Scottsbluff, said experts estimate that as many 10 people died for every mile of the trail ‒ perhaps as many as 20,000 travelers, plus an unknown number of Native Americans killed during skirmishes. And yet the pioneers kept heading west for decades.
Wolf said he’s often wondered what it would take for Americans today to sell virtually everything they have and begin a long, hard journey to a new home. During the Oregon Trail times, he said, Americans were lured by the promise of free or cheap land. Many were spurred on by religious fervor and the concept of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the Christian God had ordained that White settlers should colonize North America, from sea to shining sea.
“You had tornadoes, you had lightning strikes, you had snakes ‒ just simply getting run over by a wagon, a gun discharging because it fell off. You falling down and breaking your leg. Then what do you do next?” Wolf said. “And of course, then you’ve got the diseases, right? You’ve got cholera, you’ve got dysentery … it was no piece of cake. You really have to admire the people that sold everything ‒ it’s ‘Oregon or bust.'”
A plaque along the Oregon Trail at Register Cliff Historic Site in Platte County, Wyo., remembers the people who passed along the way during the 1850s-era westward expansion.
Congress helped shape the migration by granting White settlers free land in Oregon, up to 640 acres for a married couple, depending on when they arrived. That government decision helped spur a mass migration with few historical parallels, especially for European immigrants who rarely had opportunities for private land ownership back home.
In subsequent years, Congress has continued to shape where Americans live, in part by subsidizing flood insurance, electricity rates and development. That’s why states like Florida, Arizona and Texas have seen such rapid growth over the past few decades, said Porter, the demographer, as people sought cheaper land and better jobs than those available in the Northeast and the rustbelt of the Midwest.
California saw a boom following the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, as about 300,000 Americans headed west down Route 66 from Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas. They had been driven from their farms by drought and poor agricultural practices that left topsoil vulnerable to erosion.
Porter said people at the time didn’t consider themselves climate refugees, even though the environment clearly played a role in their decision to seek, literally, greener pastures. And he said climate considerations are today driving an increasing number of Americans to move back to the Midwest and Northeast to escape the higher costs of living driven by climate factors: flooding, hurricane damage, intense heat or wildfires.
Many of those people don’t necessarily realize their high insurance and housing costs are being driven in part by billion-dollar disasters fueled by climate change, emergency managers say.
“The same weather that pulled people there is turning into a ‘push’ factor and pushing them back out of the area,” Porter said.
“I think you are going to see people move away from the Gulf Coast as sea levels continue to rise, and there will be a movement to the Midwest and parts of the Northeast,” he said. “What people are looking for is opportunity and avoidance of risk, and a future that avoids the financial concerns that come from climate risk.”
The pioneer spirit ‒ then and now
Zieber’s father cited the East Coast’s weather as a factor in seeking his fortune in Oregon, and the family successfully made the transit, eventually settling near Salem. Her father, a printer, quickly found work for the newly founded Oregon Statesman newspaper, and Eugenia soon married the paper’s editor, Asahel Bush.
In her trail diary, Zieber recorded both the daily tribulations but also the optimism of a better life ahead.
She had been attending finishing school in the East when her father made the decision to head west. The family ate dried meats, bread and crackers, along with what meat they could hunt along the way, passing by barely marked graves, abandoned wagons and unfamiliar landscapes.
“This, or what we took of it, we held in our hands and sat on logs, stumps, etc., to partake of it. Many would look upon this as a most awkward way of eating, but I think it really pleasant. The sky above you clearly seen, not kept from your sight by any obstructing roof. The trees looking fresh & happy around you, and flowers peeping up from the bright grass, as though desirous of taking notes of your proceedings,” Zieber wrote. “Who would then not prefer this to a table profusely covered with dishes filled with dainties of every kind, shut up in a house, the work of art! Give me rather fair Nature’s beauties shed abroad to my view, and ‘twill lend a charm to everything.”
Zieber and her new husband had four children in rapid succession, but she died in 1863 at age 30 from tuberculosis. Her family’s legacy lives on, however, in Oregon parks and historical sites named in their honor. Her husband, who also moved to Oregon in 1851 ‒ from Massachusetts via the Panama Canal ‒ used his paper to advance his political positions, among them support for Oregon’s 1857 ban on Black immigration to the state
In 1850, there were only 13,000 people living in all of Oregon, according to the Census. A decade later, there were 52,000, including just 128 people of African descent.
Many of those new settlers helped lay the groundwork for Oregon’s present success ‒ from Nike to tech companies like Intel, along with farming, logging and agriculture.
Historians say American innovations in medicine, science and technology today are being driven by the same can-do attitude that prompted their forebears to travel the trail.
“I think it’s the spirit of America,” Wolf said. “We talk about Manifest Destiny and people just picking up from what they know, immigrants coming over with the promise of fertile land, free land, cheap land. It’s that kind of just pioneer spirit that America just kind of had from the beginning, all the way to its present day … I think it really captures what it is to be an American.”
Ruts carved by travelers on the Oregon Trail remain visible more than 100 years after the last people passed this way in wagon trains, their metal-rimmed wheels wearing deep grooves in the rock near the Green River at the Oregon Trail Ruts State Historic Site near Guernsey, Wyo..
Atop Scotts Bluff, Johnny Blevins and his wife marveled at that pioneer spirit, which marked the land with wagon ruts still visible today.
Blevins said they spent their summer vacations dragging their kids to national parks and other historical sites around the country ‒ never the beach. The couple has remained fascinated by the gumption it took pioneers to give up everything for a chance at a better life, an approach Blevins said he sometimes wishes he’d used more often when younger.
“I regret the things I didn’t do more than the things I did. I wish I had been more adventurous,” he said.
Laughing with his wife, Vicki, Blevins recounted how their kids complained about staying in cheap hotels on their summer trips.
“Our kids would complain, ‘why can’t we go to the beach like everyone else,'” he said. “And I would say to them, ‘(at least) it’s not a wagon ‒ and we’re not walking.'”
But those travels instilled in them a deep love for America, he said, and one of their children is now a history teacher.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: We found the ‘spirit of America’ as we traveled the Oregon Trail.
