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The 1923 silent movie called “The Covered Wagon” committed grave errors in depicting the journey of thousands of emigrants who crossed the Oregon Trail to settle the Pacific Northwest in the mid-19th century.
So says Ezra Meeker as depicted by Ray Egan, of Steilacoom.
The history reenactor, dressed as well-known Washington state pioneer Ezra Meeker, visited Steamboat Landing Toledo in late April at the request of the Toledo Historical Society to set the record straight.
The presentation started with the airing of a snippet from the 98-minute 1923 Paramount Pictures movie, “The Covered Wagon,” directed by James Cruze. The silent film, based on a novel of the same name, depicted two caravans that joined in Kansas to cross the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail in 1848 and the hazards they faced such as hunger, bad weather, buffalo stampedes and Indian attacks.
First off, Egan as Meeker said, the film showed people crossing the trail in Conestoga wagons, but in reality, most pioneers traveled with oxen hauling less expensive, lighter and narrower prairie schooners. Meeker was 21 when he crossed the Oregon Trail in 1852 with his 18-year-old wife, Eliza Jane (Sumner) Meeker, and their 6-week-old son, Marion. Meeker later founded the city of Puyallup.
Years later, in 1906, with pioneers dying out and the Oregon Trail fading from memory, Meeker retraced his journey with oxen and wagon, this time west to east, campaigning for communities to erect markers commemorating the trail that helped settle the west. In 1916, he crossed the trail in an automobile provided by the Pathfinder Car Co. of Indianapolis, and in 1924, flew over the trail in three days courtesy of a War Department airplane.
“Therefore, my friends, from experience, I can assure anyone who has not yet seen one of these moving picture shows that for your two bits, you’re going to get more scenery than fact,” he said.
The offer of free fertile farmland drew the pioneers west to Oregon Territory, he said, although midway between Pocatello and Twin Falls in present-day Idaho, a good number headed southwest to California and Mormons turned south to Salt Lake seeking religious freedom. Many left for a land free from diseases that ravaged the Mississippi Valley such as smallpox, cholera, scarlet fever and malaria — or chills — but wound up bringing them west with them. Others sought to escape unhappy marriages or creditors.
“But most Oregon-bound immigrants came here for the free land that the government promised,” he said — originally 640 acres for a couple and 320 acres for a single man, but those numbers were cut in half later when demand increased.
“We immigrants fervently believed that life in the Oregon Country was going to be so much better in some way or another,” he said. “And so the prospect of taking land from the Indians, in truth, I must say, rested easily on our consciences, if indeed anyone much thought of it at all.”
Egan noted that pioneers referred to it as crossing the plains or, as maps depicted it, the Great American Desert, which described the first 600 miles from the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers to the foot of the Rocky Mountains. He said that was the easiest third of the journey with plentiful drinking water for their animals, followed by the crossing through South Pass in the Rocky Mountains and the most arduous part the 40 miles through the Blue Mountains.
In 1805, Meriwether Lewis and Captain William Clark crossed the land on a partly similar route but not with wagons and families. Then a group of men from Fort Astoria in 1812 trekked overland back to the East Coast of the United States.
“They made an enormously important discovery that Indians had known since time out of mind,” Egan said. “They discovered the only gateway through the Rocky Mountains to the Oregon Country that wagons could safely, indeed, I’d say, comfortably, negotiate — South Pass in today’s Wyoming.”
Then Jedidiah Smith traveled southwest searching for what became the Santa Fe Trail, followed in 1832 by Captain Benjamin Bonneville, who left Missouri with 110 men on a trip financed by John Jacob Astor to explore overland routes to the Oregon Territory.
Then, in 1836, Dr. Marcus Whitman and his wife, Narcissa, traveled west to near present-day Walla Walla with Rev. Henry Spalding and his wife, Eliza.
“Narcissa had first been wooed by one Henry Spalding,” Egan as Meeker said, noting she rejected his suit and married Dr. Whitman. “Well, then who should join the newly wedded Whitmans in their ministry and share their honeymoon tent? Yes, one Henry Spalding, now Rev. Henry Spalding and his wife, Eliza.”
The Spaldings later established a mission at Lapwai near present-day Lewiston, Idaho, so they escaped the carnage left in 1847 when Cayuse natives, angered over white settlers bringing diseases that killed their people, attacked the Whitmans and killed Marcus, Narcissa and a dozen others. However, the Spaldings’ daughter, little Eliza, who was staying at the Whitman mission school, escaped injury and served as an interpreter with the natives who captured her and 45 other women and children.
The first big western emigration began in earnest in 1843 when hundreds of men, women and children crossed the Oregon Trail to the Pacific Northwest. Outfitting a wagon to cross the trail cost anywhere from $700 to $1,400 in the 1840s, the equivalent of $24,000 to $48,000 in today’s dollars.
“In a word, a pretty penny,” Egan said. “From that we can draw a conclusion that most people who came here over the Oregon Trail were not poor. So, we’re dispelling myths now.”
Heat, dust, fatigue, fires, accidents, diseases and anger engulfed the member of companies traveling west, to say nothing of disputes over issues such as whether to honor the Sabbath and stay put on Sundays. Sometimes disputes led to trains splitting up. Egan spoke of the Donner-Reed Party, which took a “so-called” shortcut to California in 1846, but delays forced them to winter in the Sierra Nevada range, where some resorted to cannibalism to survive. Only 48 of the 87 members survived.
A boy riding on a wagon tongue fell to the ground, killed when the heavy wagon rolled over him. A woman passing too close to a fire found her skirts engulfed in flames. Perilous river crossings left men drowning at the bottom of rivers.
“One of the party went to Mrs. Stevens, saying, ‘Mr. Stevens is drowning!’ ‘Well,’ she replied, ‘there’s plenty more men where he came from.’ I can tell you that Mr. Stevens probably, to his dismay, survived.”
Although most pictures don’t show it, the Oregon Trail also brought black people west, some free and some still in slavery, Egan said. George Washington Bush, who crossed the trail in 1844 and saved many whites from starvation, rests in Tumwater’s Pioneer Cemetery, and an unrelated man, George Washington, who crossed in 1850, founded the town of Centerville, today known as Centralia.
“He, too, saved many whites from want after the financial panic of 1893,” Egan as Meeker said. “He lies in the cemetery that he donated to Centralia.”
Emigrants showed kindness to one another, helping to shove wagons stuck in mud and mire, offering to help repair a widow’s wagon. At times, they listened at night during cholera epidemics to the screams of sick and dying compatriots, the wails of grieving mothers or the cries of women laboring to deliver babies along the trail.
In the early years, Native Americans seldom accosted emigrants traveling west, and in fact, many times they traded with them for food. Natives found themselves angry with white men who slaughtered buffalo, elk, deer and antelope for sport rather than food.
“Yes, there were Indian attacks, but mostly those attacks were in retaliation for abuses by whites from earlier trains,” Egan said.
As more people arrived in Oregon, demand for land increased.
“Any of you who have been to Portland, if you walk downtown, you’ll notice that the streets are shorter,” Egan said. “They’re two-thirds the size of the standard street. And what happened was the earliest developers of Portland knew that corner lots sold for more, so they decided to have more corners.”
Wagons crossed the trail sometimes six abreast, seldom in a single straight line as depicted in many movies and photos, to avoid the dust of people in front of them, Egan said. On the Mondays after Sunday worship women traditionally did laundry.
They sought to reach Independence Rock by the Fourth of July, and after crossing the Blue Mountains of Oregon, some after 1946 took the rough Barlow Road around Mount Hood to the Willamette Valley if they could pay five dollars per wagon while others floated down the Columbia to the Willamette River on bateaux or other flat-bottomed boats.
After the Snake River, with water harder to find, bones of dead animals littered the trailside.
“The stench was everywhere,” Egan said. “We are hardly out of sight of dead cattle on this side of the Snake River.”
He told of 18-year-old Margaret Windsor who carried an orphaned infant and searched the camps for someone to suckle the baby. Nobody refused. She married Felix Inman at the Upper Cascades in Washington Territory, settled in Stevenson and lived to 90.
Perhaps inspired by her 1852 experience on the trail with the motherless infant, she raised 16 children — nine boys and seven girls. She then adopted a 17th child, a boy.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
