Field Notes from the Platte River Road

Field Notebook of Dr. Teresa Halvorsen, Historian

1Stop 1, Independence, Missouri. This was a main starting point for the Oregon Trail, which ran about 2,000 miles to Oregon's Willamette Valley. Historians estimate that roughly 400,000 people traveled the Oregon, California and Mormon trails between the 1840s and 1869. Most wagon trains left in April or May. A museum guide reminded me that in March the prairie grass here is still short and brown, and that oxen and mules ate grass all the way west.

2Stop 2, the Platte River near Kearney, Nebraska. The Platte is wide and shallow, braided into channels around sandy islands. The valley floor is flat and grassy for miles, and the few trees grow mostly on the islands. Wagon trains followed this river for hundreds of miles. This valley was also the homeland of the Pawnee, who farmed corn, beans and squash near their earth-lodge villages and hunted bison on the plains. As wagon traffic grew, travelers' animals ate the grass and travelers cut the scarce wood. In the 1870s, the United States moved the Pawnee to Indian Territory. The Pawnee Nation's government is based today in Pawnee, Oklahoma.

3Stop 3, Scotts Bluff, Nebraska. Huge clay and sandstone bluffs rise from the plain, and travelers used them as landmarks. Out here there are almost no trees. At a rebuilt homestead I saw a house made of blocks of prairie sod, a windmill that pumped water up from deep underground, and a fence of barbed wire, which was invented in the 1870s. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, a family could claim 160 acres of public land if they lived on it and farmed it for five years.

4Stop 4, Fort Laramie, Wyoming. In 1851, at Horse Creek, about 35 miles east of this fort, U.S. officials met with the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow and other nations. The treaty set boundaries for each nation's lands and promised yearly payments; in return the nations agreed to let travelers pass and the army build roads and posts. Within a few years, more travelers, soldiers and later miners crossed these lands, and the Senate cut the promised payments. Lakota and Cheyenne families relied on the great bison herds, which shrank to perhaps a few hundred wild animals in the United States by the late 1880s. Today the Oglala Sioux Tribe, one of the Lakota nations, governs the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

5Stop 5, South Pass, Wyoming. I expected steep peaks, but the pass is a broad, gentle valley about 20 miles wide, at roughly 7,400 feet above sea level. Wagons crossed the Continental Divide here without climbing a cliff. Snow can fall here as early as September. This is homeland of the Eastern Shoshone. Under the 1868 Fort Bridger Treaty, signed by Chief Washakie, the Wind River Reservation was set aside nearby; the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho both live there today.