Starting with the Great Migration of 1843, thousands of emigrants set out on the 2000-mile journey to Oregon, but most ventured into the unknown with little reliable information on the route to follow. The guidebooks they carried were often misleading and sometimes downright dangerous.
Only a few guidebooks were published before the discovery of gold in California in 1848. After the Gold Rush began, many guides tried to capitalize on eager travelers’ need for information, though these references were often as unreliable as the earlier books.
The first published report of a journey to Oregon was John C. Frémont’s government report of his 1842 expedition through the West, published in 1843. Frémont’s Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains was an official document, not meant for emigrants. Nevertheless, it quickly became a trusted reference for wagon trains. Frémont’s descriptions of landmarks like Independence Rock, South Pass, and the Green River offered the first printed accounts of Oregon Territory. But Frémont traveled with a military detail, not with women and children. His descriptions of the geography gave little indication of the hardships of hauling large wagons through dust, heat, and mountain passes.
In 1845, Lansford W. Hastings published The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California, the most notorious of all the trail guides. Hastings had never completed the route himself when he wrote it. His book was part practical manual and part sales pitch to promote a new overland route he called the “Hastings Cutoff” that would save hundreds of miles on the journey. The ill-fated Donner Party used his guide, but his “cutoff” was nearly impassable, adding weeks to their trip and resulting in their being trapped by an early blizzard in the Sierras. As a result of the Donner Party’s experience, many came to view Hastings as a huckster or worse.
Another emigrant, Henry S. Shively, produced a guide in 1846 simply titled Route and Distances to Oregon and California. It was a slim pamphlet—not much more than a list of mileages between landmarks—but it circulated widely because people were desperate for any scrap of information. Its data, though rough, helped travelers measure their progress and time their movements along the route.
Joel Palmer’s Journal of Travels Over the Rocky Mountains, published in 1847, gave a fuller description of the journey to Oregon. Palmer had traveled the route, and he recorded distances, landmarks, and practical advice on fording rivers and avoiding alkali water and other perils. Still, even his work offered little help to dealing with unpredictable events along the way—flooding rivers, Native American encounters, accidents, and diseases such as cholera.
Other 1840s guides were cobbled together from rumors or unreliable sources and often plagiarized one another. Though many emigrants had one or more of these documents in their possession, most travelers did better to rely on the experience of people they met along the way than on the printed word. And no guide—human or printed—could predict every peril they would encounter.
When have you followed an unreliable travel guide or map?
I was to blame, not the maps. Lacking proper map Reading skills. Getting lost în Prague and Budapest.
Marina, I can relate! I think we ALL have had times when we couldn’t read the map. Or went somewhere without a map. Theresa
Yes, that disastrous Hastings Cutoff. Currently rereading The Indifferent Stars Above. The mettle of people from this era is just amazing.
I agree, Cindy. I started writing about the Oregon Trail because I wondered why people would leave their homes and venture into unsettled land. They were braver than I am. Theresa