Oregon Trail

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de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye; the Lewis and Clark Expedition, between 1804 and 1806, made more of it known. The German-American fur trader and financier John Jacob Astor, in establishing his trading posts, dispatched a party overland in 1811 to follow the trail of these explorers. Later, mountain men such as James Bridger, who founded Fort Bridger in 1843, contributed their knowledge of the trail and often acted as guides. The first emigrant wagon train, headed by the American pioneer physician Elijah White, reached Oregon in 1842. The trip took the early pioneers four to six months, a journey fraught with much hardship resulting from poor equipment, illness, and attack by the Native Americans, for whom the growing number of pioneers on the trail was an ever-constant threat. At first, the termination point of the was Oregon City, Oregon; later, settlers continued south to the fertile and valuable land in the Willamette ...

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