As I mentioned in a recent post, the river cruise my husband and I were supposed to take in May was canceled. Periodically, I search “river cruises” and moon over the itineraries, thinking of future trips. Where might we go to escape the current boredom of life at home? So […]
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Spring Floods and the Oregon Trail
Here in the Midwest, we are experiencing serious flooding this spring. St. Joseph, Missouri, one of the prime “jumping off” points for the Oregon Trail, has had worse flooding this year than in any year in its long history. On March 22, 2019, the Missouri River reached 32.11 feet at […]
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The Kansas Museum of History in Topeka
Earlier this month I had a day by myself in Topeka, which is just over an hour’s drive from our home. I’d accompanied my husband when he had an all-day conference there, but I had no obligation until his group dinner that evening. So I designed a day to suit […]
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Farming in Oregon in the 1850s
I wrote in February of this year that I didn’t know which issues in Oregon’s history in 1850-1852 might impact my current work-in-progress. I’m slowly answering my own question as I move through the first draft. The land laws are a major factor. The discovery of gold in the Rogue […]
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The Logistics of Supplying Emigrants Along the Oregon Trail
In the modern world, we are dependent on logistics and supply chains that most people rarely think about—how goods get from where they are produced to warehouses where online orders are filled or to retail shelves where we purchase them. I imagine logistics were critical in 1847 also, and I […]
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Did the Oregon Trail Emigrants Really Circle Their Wagons?
Although pioneer journals often mention “circling the wagons,” it is not at all certain that all wagon trains pulled their wagons into a circle for the night, nor which of their possessions they protected inside those circles if they used them. One commentator has pointed out the logistical difficulties with […]
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Schools in Oregon in the 1840s
In my novel Now I’m Found, Jenny, one of the lead characters in the book, opens a school for some of the children on surrounding farms. She holds the school in her cabin. It’s a one-room cabin, and she has benches built for the children to sit on. Her only […]
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Elizabeth Markham: One Woman’s Perspective on the Oregon Trail and on Matrimony
I am surprised that in five years of writing this blog I have never written a post focused on women’s perspectives on leaving their homes and journeying west on the Oregon Trail. I’ve written about specific women—Narcissa Whitman, Jessie Benton Fremont, Elizabeth Dixon Smith, Keturah Belknap, and others—and quoted some […]
Continue readingWhy Did the Emigrants Head West? For Prosperity, Health, or “Manifest Destiny”?
I decided to write about the Oregon Trail in part because the concept of leaving home for an unknown wilderness so far away is such an alien concept to me. I’ve moved across the country on a few occasions, but I don’t like spending time in the wilderness. Why did the […]
Continue readingWhy Were the Pioneers’ Wagon Wheels So Large?
I have researched how and where the emigrants traveled along the Oregon Trail for ten years, and I’m still learning. Recently, I learned from an article in The Wall Street Journal about why the wheel is round. The article contained the sentence: “The difficulty of moving a wheeled object increases […]
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