There they, and another group that had sailed there by ship, established in 1812 Fort Astoria (now Astoria, Oregon) near the mouth of the Columbia River, the first American-owned settlement on the Pacific Ocean coast and what the company hoped would be the major post from which Astor would conduct trade with China.Īstor’s expedition, in dire need of supplies and help, sent members back east in 1812. Louis to Arikara Indian villages in what is now South Dakota and then struck out on the difficult trek across the plains and mountains through Wyoming and Idaho to Oregon. The men followed the Missouri River upstream from St.
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In 1810 fur entrepreneur John Jacob Astor organized an expedition of frontiersmen to head westward and establish a trading post for his American Fur Company in Oregon. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. He and Shoshone wife Sacagawea were instrumental members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–06), the government’s first attempt to systematically explore, map, and report on its newly acquired lands and the Oregon country that lay beyond them. One of those was the French Canadian trapper and explorer Toussaint Charbonneau.
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Thus, before the turn of the 19th century few whites had ventured into the vast territory west of the Mississippi River that came to be included in the U.S. Until the trail’s development as a wagon route, however, people of European descent (whites) in eastern North America who wished to travel to California or Oregon generally went by ship around the southern tip of South America, an arduous and often harrowing sea journey that could take nearly a year to complete. 1811–40) who traveled on foot and horseback. Portions of what was to become the Oregon Trail were first used by trappers, fur traders, and missionaries (c. From there travelers could float downstream or, after 1846, go overland through the Cascade Range to the trail’s western terminus in the fertile Willamette valley situated between the Cascades and the Coast Ranges to the west. Entering the northeastern corner of present-day Oregon, the trail crossed the Blue Mountains before reaching the lower Columbia River. In southwestern Wyoming, after having run largely westward for hundreds of miles, the route trended generally to the northwest as it traversed more mountains and then followed the relatively level plain of the Snake River in what is now southern Idaho. There, leaving the river, it crossed its first mountain ranges before heading across the arid and desolate Great Divide Basin. Skirting the southern end of the Sand Hills, it continued along the North Platte River (a major tributary of the Platte) into much drier and increasingly rugged lands in what is now southern Wyoming. From Independence it first traversed the vast prairie grasslands of present-day northeastern Kansas and southern Nebraska, there following the Platte River. It crossed varied and often difficult terrain that included large territories occupied by Native Americans.
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The Oregon Trail, which stretched for about 2,000 miles (3,200 km), flourished as the main means for hundreds of thousands of emigrants to reach the Northwest from the early 1840s through the 1860s. 1850, with state and territorial boundaries.
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