The Great Migration of 1843 — Jesse Applegate’s Cow Column

Summary

In the spring of 1843 the largest body of emigrants yet seen on the American frontier gathered on the Missouri border and set their faces toward Oregon. They numbered somewhere between seven hundred and a thousand men, women and children, with roughly a hundred and twenty wagons and thousands of head of cattle. Until that year Oregon had drawn only a few hundred scattered settlers and a handful of missionaries, and the trail itself was barely a track. The Great Migration of 1843 — often simply the Great Emigration — changed that in a single season.

It proved that ordinary families could take wagons the full two thousand miles toward the Columbia, and it tipped the contest for the Oregon Country decisively toward the United States. The company was too large to travel as one mass, and its story is really the story of how it organized itself. After early friction over the great cattle herds, the emigrants split into two divisions: a faster "light column" of those with few cattle, and a slower "cow column" burdened with the herds.

The cow column found its chronicler in Jesse Applegate, a young Missouri farmer of unusual eloquence who, decades later, wrote a short memoir called "A Day with the Cow Column in 1843" — long regarded as among the finest descriptions of overland life, and the reason the migration is remembered so vividly today. The migration's purpose was as much political as personal. Oregon in 1843 was held jointly by Britain and the United States under a treaty of "joint occupation," with the Hudson's Bay Company dominant on the ground. The settlers of 1843 were Americans pouring into contested country.

The great unanswered question when they started was whether wagons could reach the Columbia at all. Past parties had abandoned theirs at Fort Hall on the advice of the Hudson's Bay men. In 1843, with the missionary doctor Marcus Whitman traveling among them and urging them on, the emigrants refused, and most brought their vehicles much farther west than anyone before. By early October the worn, dusty column was descending into the Willamette Valley, and the American settlement of Oregon had become a fact no treaty could undo.

The Departure

The emigrants gathered in May 1843 at the jumping-off places along the Missouri frontier — chiefly at Elm Grove and the trailheads near Independence — drawn by the same restless mix of motives: cheap land, hard times in the Mississippi Valley after the Panic of 1837, the lure of a mild Oregon climate, and a swelling national feeling that the Pacific Northwest ought to be American. They came as families, with milk cows and seed and plows lashed to their wagons, intending not to trap or trade but to farm and to stay. Their sheer numbers were the news: where the emigration of 1842 had counted in the low hundreds, the company of 1843 ran to perhaps a thousand souls.

Such a crowd could not simply set off. At the gathering grounds and on the Kansas River they held meetings, drew up rules, and elected officers; Peter Burnett, a Missouri lawyer who would later become the first American governor of California, was a leading figure, and the experienced John Gantt, a former army captain, was hired as pilot for the first leg to Fort Hall at a dollar a head. Almost at once the company discovered the central problem of a great migration: the men with large cattle herds slowed everyone down, and the men without cattle resented eating their dust. The friction nearly broke the company apart.

The solution was to divide. The emigrants split into two columns — a light, fast division for those with few or no loose cattle, and a slower "cow column" for the families driving the great herds. Jesse Applegate, who himself owned many cattle, was chosen to captain the cow column. Traveling with the company was Dr. Marcus Whitman, returning west to his mission, whose presence and encouragement would matter enormously when the time came to decide whether the wagons could go all the way through. With its order settled, the column rolled west onto the plains in the early summer of 1843.

The Route

The route was the Oregon Trail as it would be known for a generation, though in 1843 it was still half-formed. From the Missouri the columns followed the Platte River across the level immensity of the plains — Applegate's prose makes the wagons into a slow fleet moving over a sea of grass — past the landmarks every later diary would name: the Platte bottoms, Chimney Rock, Scotts Bluff, and on to Fort Laramie at the edge of the mountains. Beyond Laramie the trail climbed gradually through present Wyoming to South Pass, the broad, easy saddle over the Continental Divide, and then dropped toward the trading post at Fort Hall on the Snake River.

Fort Hall was the moment of decision. The Hudson's Bay Company men there had long advised emigrants that wagons could go no farther and should be abandoned for pack animals, and in earlier years parties had done exactly that. In 1843 the emigrants, urged on by Marcus Whitman and stiffened by their own numbers, refused. They pressed down the long, dry, dangerous valley of the Snake, fording its forks and inching along its lava canyons, and most kept their wagons — bringing them much farther than any wagon train before and effectively extending the wagon road across the worst of the country.

The last stretch was the cruelest. Past Fort Boise the trail crossed the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon, a steep, timbered barrier the emigrants had to cut and clear a trail through, and came down at last toward the Columbia near the Whitman Mission and The Dalles. Here, in 1843, the wagon road truly ended: there was as yet no road around Mount Hood, and the emigrants faced the Columbia's gorge. Many broke down their wagons and floated the pieces, their families, and their goods on rafts and Hudson's Bay bateaux down the wild river, running rapids and portaging the falls, while the cattle were driven over rough trails along the banks. It was a perilous, improvised finish to two thousand miles.

The Crossing

The texture of those months survives chiefly because Jesse Applegate set it down. In "A Day with the Cow Column in 1843" he gives us the camp at dawn: "It is four o'clock A.M.; the sentinels on duty have discharged their rifles — the signal that the hours of sleep are over." He describes the great corral of seventy-two wagons drawn into a circle as a fortress, the cattle turned out to graze under guard, the cooks at their fires, and then the long line of vehicles uncoiling onto the prairie at the pilot's signal as "the leading division of the wagons moves out of the encampment, and takes up the line of march." From a rise he watches the whole column strung across the plain and reflects that the people driving it are not soldiers or adventurers but plain farmers carrying the seed of a future state west on their wagon wheels.

Applegate's account lingers on the order beneath the apparent chaos — the discipline of guards and herders and pilots that kept a thousand people and their thousands of animals moving across a continent without a state, a sheriff, or a road. The cow column was the slow, dusty, unglamorous half of the migration, and Applegate makes it the heart of the thing: the families who would not leave their cattle, and so could not be hurried, were the ones who came to stay and to build. His ten pages, first published in 1876, became the migration's enduring memorial.

For all the danger, the human cost of 1843 was strikingly low by the standards of the trail; the migration is remembered not for catastrophe but for its scale and its success. The great trials were not massacre or starvation but the daily grind — dust and heat on the Platte, fording the Snake, hauling over the Blue Mountains, and the deadly run down the Columbia, where the river took its toll on the rafts. The emigrants of 1843 generally found the native peoples along the route — the Pawnee and Sioux of the plains, the Shoshone of the Snake country, the Cayuse and Nez Perce near the Columbia — more often curious and willing to trade than hostile, and much of the company's safety owed to peaceful passage through nations not yet pushed to resist the flood. By early October the worn wagons and weary families were coming down into the green Willamette Valley, the journey done.

What Decided It

Arrival & After

By early October 1843 the migration had reached the Willamette Valley, and the population of American settlers in Oregon had roughly tripled in a single season. The newcomers spread out to claim and farm the rich bottomlands around the Willamette and its tributaries, and almost at once the character of the country changed: Oregon was now, unmistakably, an American settlement, whatever the diplomats in London and Washington might still pretend. The settlers had already begun building an American civil order, organizing a Provisional Government, drafting laws and electing officers years before the boundary was fixed.

The political consequences were enormous. The flood that began in 1843 and swelled in the years after made joint occupation untenable; "Oregon fever" and the slogans of expansion fed directly into the politics of the mid-1840s and the settlement of the boundary with Britain at the 49th parallel in 1846. The families who walked the trail in 1843 had, by simply arriving in such numbers and staying to plow, done what no army or treaty had yet accomplished — they had made Oregon American on the ground.

Jesse Applegate became one of the most influential men in early Oregon, a leader in the Provisional Government and, with his brothers Charles and Lindsay, the pathfinder of the Applegate Trail, a southern alternative route into the Willamette Valley opened in 1846. The family knew loss of its own in 1843, when two boys of the Applegate party drowned in the Columbia crossing — a grief that helped drive Jesse to seek a safer southern road. But it is the small memoir he wrote in later years, "A Day with the Cow Column in 1843," that keeps the migration alive — a farmer's elegy for the slow, dusty wagons that carried the seed of a great state across the plains.

Lessons

References

• Great Migration of 1843 Wikipedia
• Jesse Applegate (1811-1888) The Oregon Encyclopedia
• A Day with the Cow Column in 1843 / Oregon Pioneers of 1843 OregonPioneers.com
• The Applegates Oregon History Project
• Oregon Trail Wikipedia