Origin of the Oregon Trail
The first paths from the mouth of the Kansas River into the Platte Valley were made by the wild denizens of those regions before the appearance of even the Indian. These paths were not continuous the whole distance, but led from valley to valley at many places. When man had dispersed himself over the land the most direct of the old animal roads were unconsciously connected and identified as paths from village to village, from tribe to tribe. So were the foundations of the Oregon Trail laid in savagery in the early history of human progress.
The Rocky Mountain Fur Company was organized by William H. Ashley at St. Louis in 1822. In 1823 Ashley followed his partner, Andrew Henry, who had taken out the first expedition in 1822. Both these parties followed the Missouri River. Ashley was attacked at the Aricara towns and driven down the river. But the two divisions of the company were finally united. At the close of the campaign of Colonel Leavenworth against the Aricaras Henry was sent on to the post at the mouth of the Yellowstone. He believed that point unfavorable for his business, and resolved to seek a location higher up on that stream. Having secured a supply of horses from the Crows, Henry sent a party under Etienne Provost to hunt in a southwest direction. While there is no record to that effect, there is every reason to believe that Provost led his party through South Pass—the first white men to cross the Continental Divide there. But as set down before in these pages, lone trappers or insignificant parties of them likely went through this pass many years before the expedition of Provost. Some tradition of it may have lingered in the rude cabins of the coureurs du bois to lead this French captain in that direction. And whether Provost did, in fact, discover the Pass in the fall of 1823, it became certainly known in 1824. Hunt and Crooks traversed that part of the Oregon Trail from the Portneuf to the mouth of Columbia in 1811-13 in command of the overland Astorian expedition. The Astorian leaders passed over some parts of the trail east of Portneuf on their journey back to the Missouri. In the expeditions of General Ashley in the management of his business of the Rocky Mountains he seems never to have passed over that part of the Oregon Trail later to be included in Kansas. He kept to the Missouri and the Platte. At just what time the trapper caravans began to reach the Platte Valley by way of the Kansas River there is no record to tell. Fort Leavenworth was established as a Cantonment in 1827. After that date any party traveling to the northwest would be likely to start from the fort and follow the route of the Oregon Trail, later much used from that point. Perhaps Jedediah S. Smith came in over this part of the trail in 1831, upon his return from the mountains. A letter written by him on this journey is still extant, being in the library of the Kansas State Historical Society. It is dated—"Blue Earth Fork of Kansas, 30 miles from the Ponnee Village, Sept. 10, 1830." The courier to whom this letter was entrusted was overtaken, and Smith added the following postscript: "P. S. Having overtaken this letter, the 22d of Sept., at the Kansas Fairry, 30 miles from camp Leavenworth, or rather Cantonment Leavenworth; I add we are thus far safe. J. S. S."
Smith had evidently gone to Fort Leavenworth from the head waters of the Big Blue. It would not have required twelve days to have passed over that distance, so he must have stopped at the fort. The ferry on the Kansas River, where he came up with the messenger to whom he entrusted his letter, was at the trading-house of Cyprian Chouteau, which stood on the south bank of the Kansas River.
When the white man came into these western wilds he, of necessity,
followed in the ways of the savage predecessors. And when the white man
first came into these Plains and the Mountains beyond no one can now tell.
In the subjection of every wilderness there is a preliminary period of
individual and largely irresponsible exploration of which no record is
ever made. Frenchmen, individuals, and in small parties, wandered,
traveled, hunted, traded—all in a petty and insignificant manner—long
before the dispatch from any settlement or fort of authorized expeditions.
They were long previous to Bourgmont or Du Tisne or Pike or Long. Pike
notes their presence at the village of the Republican Pawnees. And so, the
pioneer white men to thread the mazes of the Plains by the primitive paths
which became the Oregon Trail, are swallowed up in obscurity—never to be
known.
The love of property had long been the dominating motive and ruling
passion of mankind. It is now the instinct of the individual and the
policy of the nation to trade. And the development of trade with the
savage inhabitants was the motive of the first excursions into the
wilderness of the West of which accounts have been preserved. These
excursions assumed sufficient proportions to attract public attention
immediately after the return of Lewis and Clark from their famous
exploration. St. Louis was the head and center of all commercial
enterprise for the Missouri River region of that time. Manuci Lisa
organized an expedition in 1807 to fix trading stations about the head
waters of the Missouri. On his way up that river on this purpose he met
John Colter, one of the expedition of Lewis and Clark. That intrepid
backwoodsman was induced to enter Lisa's service and return to the
mountains as guide to the party. He led Lisa up the Yellowstone to the
mouth of the Bighorn River, where the first trading-post of his venture
was established. This point was in the country of the Crows, and the
fixing of the post there angered the Blackfeet—a matter which troubled the
traders and trappers much thereafter.
In the same year a party was organized at St. Louis for the purpose of
escorting the Mandan chief Shahaka back to his village on the Missouri. He
had come down with Lewis and Clark under promise that he should be seen
safely home again. The party was so fiercely assailed by the tribes of the
Upper Missouri that it failed to reach the Mandan villages, and it
returned to St. Louis.
Lisa was the only man of prominence who engaged in the fur trade of that
period. In 1808 he returned from the founding of his post at the mouth of
the Bighorn. In the winter of 1808-9, he organized the Missouri Fur
Company. He ascended the Missouri in the spring of 1809 and transferred
his post at the mouth of the Bighorn to the Company, returning that year.
He made another journey to the same point in 1810. In 1811 he again
visited his post on the Yellowstone, arriving at St. Louis on his return
in October. He had established trading relations with other tribes in the
mountains, and during the winter of 1811-12 he reorganized his company. He
visited his trading-houses in the summer of 1812, but did not return to
St. Louis that year. On this expedition he established Fort Lisa, in the
Omaha Nation, and formed a connection with that tribe which gave him its
trade. He returned to St. Louis in June, 1813. The war of 1812 made it
dangerous and unprofitable to trade with the savage tribes of the Upper
Missouri. In 1814 Lisa was given the post of sub-Agent to the Missouri
River Indians above the Kansas River. In this work he spent a year at Fort
Lisa, which was about fifteen miles above the present town of Omaha, on
the west bank of the Missouri, and three miles above the mouth of the
Boyer River. From this point, in the summer of 1815, he led forty-three
chiefs and head men of the tribes of the Upper Missouri to St. Louis to
make treaties with the United States. His influence brought them to the
side of the Americans and prevented them from joining the British. Lisa
continued in this trade until his death, which occurred in St. Louis in
August, 1820. The Chouteaus had been associated with him in his
transaction on the Upper Missouri. They were members of the Missouri Fur
Company together, this company succeeding Lisa, Menard and Morrison by
purchase. The company was reorganized in 1819 and continued in business
some years. None of its transaction had specially to do with the country
which became Kansas. But this brief outline of its business was compiled
in the belief that an account of the establishment of the fur trade on the
Missouri was necessary here. There were other traders on the Upper
Missouri during the time that Lisa and his associates were trading there.
Crooks and McLellan were the partners of one company. They later became
partners of John J. Astor in his Pacific Fur Company, a branch of the
American Fur Company. The Astorians organized an overland expedition from
St. Louis in 1811. It did not follow the Oregon Trail, as it was then the
custom to follow up the Missouri River. Communications overland could not
be maintained over the route, and this was one of the serious
disadvantages of the Astoria enterprise. It was reserved for later fur
traders to begin the use of those primitive roads which later became the
Oregon Trail—the natural route—the Imperial Highway.
Late in October, 1824, General Ashley set out from St. Louis with a
party to ascend the Missouri. It seems that this was an overland
expedition. James P. Beckwourth was a member of it—his initial trip to the
mountains. He says: "We started on the 11th of October with horses and
pack-mules. Nothing of interest occurred until we approached the Kansas
village, when we came to a halt and encamped." The site of this village
would be difficult to determine now, perhaps. It may have been the Kansas
town at the mouth of the Big Blue, though it is scarcely probable that
Ashley would take a route so far west in ascending the Missouri. Wyeth
found the main Kansas village at a point where North Topeka was laid out,
and his second journey was in 1834. Frederick Chouteau said the Fool Chief
had his village there in 1830. Some part of the Upper village must have
removed to the Topeka site as early as 1824, the time of Ashley's
expedition. The language of Beckwourth can mean nothing else than that
when considered in connection with other facts already established.
At the Kansas town it developed that more horses would be required. It is
possible that a change of plan was matured there, for General Ashley seems
to have changed his course, striking for the Missouri, possibly going
along the Indian trail which came out on that stream at the present town
of Atchison. Beckwourth and Moses Harris were dispatched to the Republican
Pawnee town on the Republican to buy horses. They found the village
deserted, and their journey was fruitless. No food was found at the
Republican town, and Beckwourth and his companion set out for the Big
Nemeha River, which they reached in a famished condition. From the head
waters of that river they went to the trading-house of Ely and Curtis, on
the Missouri, near the mouth of the Kansas in what is now Kansas City,
Kansas. On the journey down the Missouri Beckwourth was employed by G.
Chouteau, as he says, to pack furs during the winter, thus abandoning the
intention to reach the mountains that year. This Chouteau establishment
must have been the same we found under control of Cyprian Chouteau in
1830.
This incident of Beckwourth is mentioned to show that that route
afterwards so much traveled by the way of the Santa Fe Trail, Topeka, and
the Big Blue River was well known and perhaps much traveled by experienced
hunters and trappers very early in the nineteenth century—at least as
early as 1824. Beckwourth evidently passed over much of it in company with
Harris, an old-time trapper, in that year.
In 1832, Nathaniel J. Wyeth took his first expedition overland. It passed
up the Kansas River, and it almost certainly crossed the Kansas River at
the site of the future Topeka. The route it followed was more along the
courses of the Kansas and the Big Blue than that later used.
Captain Bonneville's expedition was one of the famed journeys into the
Western wilderness. It was organized and carried out with military order
and exactness. It was the first to depend on wagons and abandon reliance
on pack-horses. It started from St. Louis in the spring 1832. Captain
Bonneville left Fort Osage, now Sibley, Jackson County, Mo., early in May.
On the 6th of that month he passed the "last border habitation," and on
the 12th he reached the Kansas River, opposite the agency of the Kansas
Indians. This agency had its origin in a treaty with that tribe made in
1825, by which the Government stipulated to initiate the Indians into the
noble art of husbandry. Three hundred cattle, the same number of hogs,
five hundred domestic fowls, three yoke of oxen, two carts, and necessary
implements were to be furnished. A blacksmith was provided. In pursuance
of the terms of this treaty an agency was established in 1827 on the north
bank of the Kansas River about two and one-half miles south of the present
Williamstown, in Jefferson County. It was about seven miles northwest of
Lawrence. Major Daniel Morgan Boone was appointed farmer, and a brother of
Governor William Clark, of Missouri, was made the agent. And it was to
this point that Captain Bonneville had come on the 12th of May, 1832. On
the 13th he made rafts, upon which he crossed his wagons and all other
effects over the Kansas River. He found Chief White Plume residing at the
agency, and the visit and conversation with that primitive monarch was
both interesting and enjoyable. From the agency Captain Bonneville passed
over the future Oregon Trail to the Platte Valley and the Rocky Mountains.
His wagons were the first to pass over the trail. The only previous
wheeled vehicle was the cannon-carriage taken into the Salt Lake Valley by
General Ashley in 1826.
There seems to be no definite record of expeditions in 1833 through Kansas
over the ways to be known as the Oregon Trail, but that there were such
expeditions there is no doubt whatever. Travel was increasing year by
year, and there were certainly individuals and small parties of free
trappers—those hunting for themselves and not for fur companies—ever on
the trail to the Rocky Mountains.
In 1834 Nathaniel J. Wyeth made his second advent on the Great Plains. He
was accompanied by John K. Townsend, who wrote an account of this, his
greatest and most extensive venture in the fur business. He entered what
is now Kansas on the first day of May, over the Santa Fe Trail. On the
third he reached and traveled on the Oregon Trail. The crossing of the
Kansas River, at the site later to become Topeka, was made on the fourth
of May. The Kansas Indian town was found to occupy both sides of the
river, and the ferry so long famous must have been already established in
a thriving business, the goods, wagons, and men being taken over in a
"long flat-bottomed boat." Frame houses were found in the Indian town, and
a number of white men engaged in farming and cattle-raising are mentioned
as living there. The expedition followed almost exactly the future Oregon
Trail to the Platte Valley.
The party of Wyeth was immediately behind the large party of William
Sublette, then going into the Rocky Mountains on the business of procuring
furs.
In the summer of 1834 a Scotchman, Charles Augustus Murray, made a trip
over the plains from Fort Leavenworth to the Pawnee villages. He arrived
at Fort Leavenworth early in July from St. Louis. At the fort he met a
large band of Pawnees and arranged to go back with them to their country.
Sa-ni-tsa-rish, chief of the Grand Pawnees, seems to have been the Indian
most depended on for protection and direction. He started in company with
the Pawnees on the 7th day of July, going by the way of the Great Nemeha.
From that stream his savage company led him to the Big Blue, but to what
point on this river can not be made out. It was probably about the present
Beatrice, Nebraska. Thence the band struck across the prairies to the
Republican, from which they led their guest to the Pawnee towns on the
Platte. Several weeks were spent there, when he was escorted back to Fort
Leavenworth by a more southern route. Murray did not travel directly over
the Oregon Trail, but his tour indicated that the country between the
Platte and the Kansas was being gone over in all directions in 1834.
Murray wrote a bulky work in two volumes, entitled Travels in North
America, describing his trip to the Great Plains with the Pawnees.
