One thing that surprises me as I research the settlement of the American West is how much some pioneers moved around in the new territory. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised because many of these people—particularly the men—were intrepid explorers or filled with wanderlust.
Daniel Boone is one famous example. He was born in Pennsylvania, moved to North Carolina, then to Virginia, then tried Florida, all before blazing the trail through the Cumberland Gap into what is now Kentucky—that was his primary claim to fame in American history. But Kentucky was not the end of his travels. Later, he moved his family into St. Charles County, Missouri, when it was still owned by Spain. During his years in Missouri, he made trips up the Missouri River, reportedly as far as Yellowstone.
John Frémont and other explorers trekked through the West, but returned East to live. Some, like Frémont, settled in Oregon or California. Still, politicians like Frémont had to travel back to Washington to attend sessions of Congress. Frémont spent time in Arizona also, before his final home on Staten Island.
Beyond early explorers like Boone and Frémont, many Oregon pioneers shows their propensity to travel. I’ve previously written about the movement of men from Oregon to California during the Gold Rush. Reportedly, two-thirds of the men in Oregon in 1848 went to California to seek gold.
Ezra Meeker was born in Ohio, moved to Indiana, and then to Iowa. In 1852, he and his family headed to Oregon. They settled in Portland for a bit, then homesteaded in Kalama across the Columbia River from Portland, but explored the Pacific Northwest. Meeker returned to Ohio to help his parents emigrate. The family settled first near Tacoma, then in 1862 he and his family took over an abandoned claim near what is now Puyallup, Washington. In his later years, Meeker traveled widely throughout the United States, encouraging people to move West and promoting the preservation of the Oregon Trail.
In my novels, I have one of the main characters in Lead Me Home travel to California in Now I’m Found. Another character in Lead Me Home and Forever Mine made a trip with Frémont exploring the West before emigrating with his family to Oregon. And in the novel I am writing now, I have my characters moving between Boston, Oregon, California, and Washington with relative ease. Obviously, it wasn’t as easy as driving or flying from city to city is today, but the coming of steamships and later railroads made travel between the East and West at least feasible, if not always comfortable or predictable.
As I wrote my novels, I wondered if I was being realistic in having characters move around so much. My own ancestors who traveled to Oregon mostly stayed put in Polk County for several generations, until my grandfather moved to Klamath Falls and then to Pacific Grove, California. But I found enough examples of real world wanderers in early Oregon to make me comfortable with the storylines I developed. In all ages, some people are destined to be travelers and some to be homebodies.
Have you traveled much around the United States? When you do, do you think about the differences between travel today and in the 19th century?
