In 1836, a decade before the great family migrations, Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Hart Spalding rode west with their missionary husbands and became, by the long-standing account, the first Euro-American women to cross the Continental Divide overland. They did it not on a wagon highway but on a thin, half-mapped fur-trade route, attached to the American Fur Company’s annual supply caravan, through country no white woman had ever traveled. Their arrival upended an assumption that had quietly governed the whole question of westward settlement: that the journey was simply too hard for women to make. If two women could reach the Oregon Country, families could follow — and within a few years, they did.
Narcissa Prentiss was a bright, devout young woman from western New York, swept up in the religious fervor of the 1830s and burning to serve as a missionary. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, however, would not send a single woman to the frontier — so when it accepted the physician Marcus Whitman, marriage became Narcissa’s passage. She and Marcus wed in February 1836 and left almost at once. Joining them were Henry Spalding, a former suitor of Narcissa’s, his wife Eliza, and the young mechanic William H. Gray. It was, by any honest reckoning, an awkward and strained little company, bound together by faith and by the sheer audacity of what they meant to do.
The party traveled up the Platte, attended the riotous 1836 fur-trade rendezvous on the Green River — where trappers and the Native nations who gathered there crowded around to see the two women — and crossed South Pass on the Fourth of July. They reached the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Fort Vancouver, and then the Whitmans established their mission at Waiilatpu, on Cayuse land near present-day Walla Walla, Washington, while the Spaldings settled among the Nez Perce at Lapwai. Narcissa’s letters and journal, written home to family she would never see again, are among the foundational documents of the overland trail — vivid, ardent, and at times painfully revealing.
Her story did not end in triumph. The mission among the Cayuse grew strained as the trickle of American emigrants she had helped make possible became a flood passing through Cayuse country, carrying disease ahead of it. In 1847 a measles epidemic killed many of the Cayuse — a people with no immunity to it — even as white children in the mission’s care recovered. On November 29, 1847, in the violence that followed, Narcissa and Marcus Whitman and others were killed. The woman whose crossing had helped open the trail was among the first Americans to die for what that opening set in motion.
The Bidwell-Bartleson Party of 1841 holds a peculiar distinction: it was the first organized company of American emigrants to set out from the Missouri frontier specifically for California, and it succeeded mainly by luck, grit, and the willingness to throw away almost everything it had brought. They had no maps worth the name, no guide who had been where they were going, and only the vaguest idea of the geography between them and the Pacific. That they got through at all marked the rough, improvised opening of the California Trail.
The company grew out of “California fever” stirred up in Missouri by glowing reports of the Mexican province, much of it secondhand or exaggerated. A schoolteacher named John Bidwell helped organize a Western Emigration Society whose membership swelled and then collapsed when the rumors soured, leaving only a hard core willing to actually go. When they gathered at the rendezvous point in May 1841, perhaps sixty-some people were ready to start — and not one of them knew the way. Their salvation, early on, was that a party of Catholic missionaries under Father Pierre-Jean De Smet was traveling the same direction with a genuine guide, the veteran mountain man Thomas “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick.
The two groups traveled together up the well-worn fur-trade corridor — the Platte, Fort Laramie, the Sweetwater, South Pass — as far as Soda Springs in present-day Idaho. There the company split. The missionaries and about half the emigrants turned northwest for the relative safety of Oregon. The remaining contingent, around thirty-some people, turned southwest toward a California they could not find on any reliable chart, leaving the guide behind. What followed was a months-long ordeal across the Great Basin: wagons abandoned one by one in the desert, oxen and mules eaten as the food ran out, a near-blind crossing of the Sierra Nevada on foot, and a final stumble down the western slope into the San Joaquin Valley.
They reached the ranch of John Marsh, near Mount Diablo, in November 1841 — starving, ragged, but alive, every one of the California-bound party having survived. Among them was Nancy Kelsey, the eighteen-year-old wife of Benjamin Kelsey, who made the entire crossing carrying her baby daughter and is often remembered as the first Euro-American woman to enter California overland. The party blazed no clean road and left no easy route behind them, but they had proved the thing could be done, and John Bidwell’s account of it became one of the founding documents of the California emigration.
Two years before the Donner Party left its wagons and its dead in the snow at a high Sierra lake, another company of emigrants stood at the foot of the same granite wall and faced the same weather. They were the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party, about fifty men, women and children — ten families — who in the autumn of 1844 became the first emigrants ever to bring wagons all the way across the Sierra Nevada into California. Where the Donner story is remembered for horror, theirs deserves to be remembered for the opposite: a company that met every disaster the mountains could offer and did not lose a single soul.
In fact they arrived with more people than they started with, for two children were born along the way. They had left Council Bluffs on the Missouri with about fifty and reached Sutter’s Fort as fifty-two. The party was a study in plain competence and luck made out of good decisions. Their elected captain was Elisha Stephens, a taciturn blacksmith and former trapper; the company hired the seasoned mountain men Caleb Greenwood and Isaac Hitchcock to help guide them. Among the families were the Murphys, a large Irish Catholic clan led by the widower Martin Murphy Sr. that alone made up some twenty-six of the company, and the household of Dr. John Townsend, a physician whose name, with Stephens’s and Murphy’s, attached itself to the party in later memory.
What sets their crossing apart is that they were inventing the route as they went. There was no California Trail in 1844 — only the Oregon road to Fort Hall, then a near-blank. From the Humboldt Sink, where earlier opinion said wagons must be abandoned, they followed the advice of a Northern Paiute leader the emigrants called Truckee and struck west up the river that still bears his name, into the highest, most broken country in the range. At the summit they did what conventional wisdom said could not be done: they unloaded and dismantled their wagons, hauled them up a granite cliff, and reassembled them on the far side.
Then winter caught them, as it would catch the Donners, and the party split and improvised its way to survival — some on horseback to Sutter’s Fort, some pushing wagons over the snow, three young men left to guard the goods at the lake, and one teenaged boy, Moses Schallenberger, left utterly alone for months and living to tell it. By February 1845 the whole company had come through. Their wagon road over the pass became, almost unchanged, the way the world would later pour into California in the Gold Rush.
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.
In June of 1846 an eighteen-year-old bride from a prominent Kentucky family climbed into a fitted carriage and rolled out of Independence, Missouri, down the Santa Fe Trail toward Mexico. Her name was Susan Shelby Magoffin, and the diary she kept of the next fifteen months — published long after her death as “Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico” — is among the most vivid and intimate records we have of the trail in the year the United States went to war with Mexico.
For generations she was called the first American woman to travel the full Santa Fe Trail. That claim has since been corrected — a trader’s wife named Mary Donoho crossed in 1833, thirteen years earlier — but it takes nothing from Susan’s diary, for no woman left so rich an account of the route. Susan was the granddaughter of Isaac Shelby, the first governor of Kentucky, and newly married to Samuel Magoffin, an established Santa Fe trader whose brother James was deep in the diplomacy and intrigue of the American conquest of New Mexico. She went not as a settler bound for free land but as a merchant’s wife traveling with his caravan of trade goods — fourteen big wagons, a baggage wagon, a carriage, servants, even chickens — and her diary records a sheltered, educated young woman thrown into the heat, dust, danger and wonder of the trail and a foreign country at war.
The journey carried her down the Arkansas to Bent’s Fort, on to a Santa Fe newly occupied by General Stephen Watts Kearny’s Army of the West, and then south along the Camino Real into the heart of Mexico — toward El Paso and Chihuahua — moving in the wake of the invading army. She traveled, in effect, in the baggage of a war, and her diary is one of the few civilian, female eyewitness accounts of the Mexican-American War from inside Mexico.
It is also a record of private grief. At Bent’s Fort, just after her nineteenth birthday, Susan suffered a miscarriage; later, gravely ill in Mexico, she gave birth to a son who did not survive — two children lost within a year. She came home alive but worn down, and she died young, at twenty-eight, her health never fully recovered. Her book, unknown for two generations, was finally published in 1926 and at once recognized as a classic of the overland and Southwestern frontier.
Most people who crossed the Oregon Trail did it once, looked back at the worst months of their lives, and never wanted to see the place again. Ezra Meeker was not most people. He crossed it as a young man of twenty-one in 1852, settled in the Pacific Northwest, grew rich, and then — more than half a century later, an old man in his mid-seventies — yoked a pair of oxen to a covered wagon and drove the whole route again, backwards, east toward the rising sun, for the express purpose of saving it from being forgotten.
Meeker was born in Ohio in 1830 and came of age just as the great migration was cresting. In 1852 he set out for Oregon Territory with his young wife, Eliza Jane, and their infant son, Marion, joining the river of wagons that flowed west that year — a year so deadly with cholera that the dead were buried almost in a continuous line along the Platte. He survived it, built a life on Puget Sound, and became one of the wealthiest hop growers in the world, the so-called “Hop King” of the Puyallup Valley, before a crop pest wiped out the boom.
By the early 1900s Meeker was an old man watching the trail of his youth vanish under plowed fields, town streets, and a generation that had never heard of it. The ruts were filling in. The graves were being lost. So in 1906, at about seventy-five, he set out from Puyallup with a covered wagon, an ox team, and a driver, intending to follow the old road eastward and shame every town along it into marking the route before the last witnesses died. He carried granite stones, gave talks, sold pamphlets, and badgered school children, mayors, and finally a President into helping him.
That first marking expedition turned into a life’s mission. Meeker would travel the trail again and again — by ox team, by automobile, and at last by airplane — pressing the same message until his death in 1928 at ninety-seven. The monuments he set, and the organization he founded, are a large part of the reason the Oregon Trail is remembered as a national story at all. He did not just cross the trail twice. He saved it.