With so much to gain and so much to lose, the troublesome fact of the prior occupation of the land could be dismissed as mere detail. One either felt sympathy for the fact that divine ordination seemed to have marked the Native Americans out to be steamrollered, or, more widely, one pointed to their failure to grasp the opportunity themselves. It was declared from the pulpits that the Indians had forfeited their claim to the land by failing to tame and exploit it, in breach of God’s very first commandment — ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; till the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’ President John Quincy Adams delivered a resonant sermon on this theme in 1839: ‘Shall the lordly savage not only disdain the virtues and enjoyments of civilization himself, but shall he control the civilization of the world? Shall he forbid the wilderness to blossom like a rose? Shall he forbid the oaks of the forest to fall before the axe of industry?’
The settlers on that Missouri riverbank were thus armed with a sense of both national and divine purpose, a sacred mission on behalf of humanity itself — which added gravitas and grandeur to their more prosaic concerns. All they really wanted was land.
When people spoke in the slums of New York, London and Naples of the ‘land of opportunity’ of inland America, it was the first word that counted. In its formation, the US had elevated the sanctity of private property, almost to the level of a faith: ‘liberty’ referred chiefly to the freedom to own and use land; democracy manifested itself in equitable access to land; ‘no taxation without representation’ was a proclamation of property rights, not human rights. This gospel, combined with the realities of a literally immeasurable quantity of seemingly unoccupied territory, generated an unimaginably enticing possibility for the poor and dispossessed of Europe and the American East — if you headed out West, staked out a quarter-mile of land, built a home and worked the soil, then that property was forever yours.
And to achieve this fantasy, the men, women and children who left their homes and rode the Oregon Trail in search of free land took on a mission no less fearsome or uncertain than any of those flag-planting endeavours whose leaders still decorate the bank notes and piazzas of old Europe. They surely deserved at least some of the avalanche of praise that would soon be heaped upon them, typified by this eulogy in a 1918 history of the pioneer days: ‘The early settlers were as noble, patriotic, industrious, unselfish, intelligent, good, generous, kind and moral people as ever were assembled together in like number.’ The trail was, to a degree, mapped out — the adventurer and self-publicist John C. Fremont had tapped his father-in-law, the expansionist congressman Thomas Hart Benton, for government funds for a settlers’ route-finding mission in 1842 — but the families who gathered their wagons on the banks of the Missouri in the spring of 1843 had no idea what lay ahead of them. The gap between expectation and reality is well illustrated by the recollection of the diarist Francis Parkman midway through the 1900-mile journey:
It is worth noticing, that on the Platte one may sometimes see the shattered wrecks of ancient claw-footed tables, well waxed and rubbed, or massive bureaus of carved oak. These, many of them no doubt the relics of ancestral prosperity in the colonial time, must have encountered strange vicissitudes. Imported, perhaps, originally from England; then, with the declining fortunes of their owners, borne across the Alleghenies to the remote wilderness of Ohio or Kentucky; then to Illinois or Missouri; and now at last fondly stowed away in the family wagon for the interminable journey to Oregon. But the stern privations of the way are little anticipated. The cherished relic is soon flung out to scorch and crack upon the hot prairie.
The challenges of the five- or six-month journey were indeed impossible to anticipate, a situation not helped by Fremont, whose best-selling trail notes pitched the expedition as exactly the kind of jolly family house move for which one would pack a walnut dresser. The privations of the prairie were specific: thirst, starvation, boredom and murderous Indian attack, the seemingly endless days of westward travel across the waterless grasslands permanently undercut with fear that a band of plains Indians would descend on a horse-stealing raid, or to deliver fatal punishment for trespassing on their hunting grounds. Watches were posted every night, the wagons circled for scant protection. Once into the mountains, river crossings brought the threat of drowning and precipitous trails crumbled, hurling oxen, wagon and driver over the edge. Illness, finally, was the greatest scourge, with precious few trail parties bearing medicine of any note. It’s estimated that one out of every ten Oregon Trail pioneers died on the route — one diarist recalled seeing ‘a grave every 80 yards’ on the way. The mythology of the West would almost instantly memorialize the optimism and stoicism of the Oregon Trail immigrants, but Parkman’s diaries speak more of melancholy suffering, of ‘men, with sour, sullen faces’ dragging their families through unimagined hardship, more refugees than empire-builders: ‘It was easy to see that fear and dissension prevailed among them…Many were murmuring against the leader they had chosen, and wished to depose him…The women were divided between regrets for the homes they had left and apprehension of the deserts and the savages before them.’
The struggle proved no deterrent, however; the year after the first wagon train, almost twice as many immigrants gathered at the Missouri, to set off as soon as the snows had melted and the prairies had turned green. By 1850 more than 13,000 non-Indian people had taken up residence in Oregon, with many more forking south from the trail into the California gold fields, and by the time the railways had fully overspread the West, at the turn of the century, fully 300,000 people had rolled their wagons along the Oregon Trail.
Route-finding soon ceased to be a challenge: by the late 1840s the trail was an unmistakable swathe of overgrazed grass and churned-up mud, several hundred metres wide in places. Bent on survival and ‘just passing through’, the emigrants thought little of housekeeping. Every tree within miles of the trail had been chopped down and burned, waterholes were fouled by rubbish and the swollen carcasses of cattle and horses, ‘trail trash’ littered the ground, and every creature that came into rifle range was felled. One emigrant, Esther Macmillan Hanna, took the long ride in 1852, and recalled: ‘I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of so many dead animals seen along the trail. It was like something from Dante’s Inferno.’ The Shoshone chief Washakie described the experience of an Indian whose homeland was on the route: ‘Before the emigrants passed through his country, buffalo, elk and antelope could be seen upon all the hills; now, when he looked for game, he saw only wagons with white tops and men riding upon their horses.’
From the vantage point of Minam Summit, on the western edge of their homelands, the Nez Perce watched the wagons roll past, more numerous each summer. The Oregon Trail didn’t trespass on their central territories, but it did head straight up the outlying Grande Ronde Valley, through traditional Indian meeting and trading grounds. Some Nez Perce profited from the desperation of the pilgrims for supplies and horses, but others urged caution, particularly when increasing numbers of settlers chose not to push on north-west to the famously fertile Willamette Valley, but elected instead to stay and cultivate the Grande Ronde. But it was one hundred or so miles further up the trail that the most fateful impacts would be felt — in the Walla Walla Valley, home of the Cayuse and, for the past ten years, of the Whitman mission.
Almost as charming as Henry Spalding, his rival in love and salvation, but considerably less ingenious or industrious, Marcus Whitman had singularly failed to convert the Cayuse people to the good word, and was considered little more than an irritant and an ingrate by his hosts. Much of this was in fact due to the fickle hand of romance. Eliza Spalding had turned out to be a natural carer and teacher, who had learned the Nez Perce language, while Narcissa Whitman was a prude and a fusspot, who had barred the Cayuse from her house for fear of parasitic infestation. As soon as the first white settlers began to pass by their house, the Whitmans rewrote