Economic Hard Times Launched Early Wagon Trains

!±8± Economic Hard Times Launched Early Wagon Trains

The earliest wagon trains of settlers headed into the Old West beginning in the early 1840s. That was no accident: It was a response to the realities of economic hard times that hurt nearly every American in the East and Midwest following an economic "panic" and ongoing depression in the mid- to late-1830s. Most of those settlers were staking all they had on the hope of finding new land, new lives, and happy times in the California and Oregon Territories.

Like most pioneers and adventurers, those settlers were willing to take risks as they looked at fulfilling their dreams -- most of them based on hope and false reports about life in the Territories. Few who went West prior to the 1840s returned to spread those tales of utopia; most tall tales of lands flowing with near biblical milk and honey were spread by those eager to sell claims to gold and fertile farm land they never owned. Other entrepreneurs were more than happy to sell wagons, bedding, food supplies, tools, and all the other outfitting the Westerners would need for the arduous journey.

According to a fascinating collection of excerpts from diaries kept by wives and mothers who made the westward trip ("Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey" by historian Lillian Schlissel) the first wagon trains headed west from departure points in Missouri in 1841. Something like 100 people migrated to the California or Oregon Territories that year. By end of 1866, according to the same source, about 350,000 men, women, and children had made the trip. This despite the social and economic upheaval of the Civil War from 1860-65.

A popular book of the mid-1840s suggested what sort of provisions each person should take along for a wagon trip over the western trails and to the Territories. Besides the clothes, furnishings, tools, and other dry goods western emigrants took along, that book recommended the following food supplies per person: 200 pounds of flour, 150 pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of coffee, 20 pounds of sugar, and 10 pounds of salt. Such supplies as chipped beef, rice, tea, dried beans, dried fruit, baking soda, vinegar, pickles, and tallow also were recommended, though no amounts suggested.

So exactly what might have pushed these pioneers to abandon the security of life in the Eastern cities, or sometimes newly settled towns and farms in the Midwest?

The 1837 "panic" or depression left much of the U.S. economy in shambles. By 1839, wages had fallen 30 to 50 percent from what they were in pre-depression days only a few years earlier. That same year, 20,000 out of work laborers demonstrated in Philadelphia and 200,000 workers in New York City were unemployed and seeking ways to provide for the winter.

Did those who took the radical step of westward emigration solve their problems and find success? Some of them did, some of them didn't. In many cases, history records disease and ill planning left small groups and large wagon trains of settlers decimated. It was said that prominent river crossings along the Oregon Trail were often littered with abandoned furniture, silverware, pianos, and many other household goods left behind because the desperate folks in their western trek had to choose between their goods and their lives.

Some of those who survived the journey were left bitter and disillusioned when they got to California or Oregon Territory. Others eventually turned back. A few found land and settled down to raise their families and form the communities that became the basis of all of our Western states today.