page_title: Oregon Trail
section_title: Life on the Trail
hierarchical_section_title: Oregon Trail / Life on the Trail
context_page_description: People traveled on the Oregon Trail in wagons in order to settle new parts of the United States of America during the 19th century. The Oregon Trail started in Missouri near the area where Kansas City, Missouri is today and ended in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The Trail was about 2,170 miles long, and could take up to six months to travel.
  People went to Oregon for many reasons. Some people wanted land. Some thought Oregon would be a better place to live. Most of them went because they wanted a new life.
  The Oregon Trail was first traveled around 1841. Once a railroad was built across the United States in 1869, people could take trains to the western United States, so fewer people began to travel west in wagons. By that time, about 400,000 people had crossed the Oregon Trail in wagons. However, some people kept traveling the Trail until the 1880s.
context_section_description: A usual day on the Trail started very early, just before dawn.  Nobody actually rode in the wagons unless they were sick or very young.  The ride was too bumpy, too dusty, and added too much work for the oxen.  Instead, people walked beside their wagons.  Usually, groups traveled almost all day, except for an hour around noon for lunch.  Then they kept moving until just before sunset, when they would stop to set up a campsite.  Most groups traveled about 15 miles per day, though on the best days they could move 20 miles a day.  Since oxen moved at about 2 miles per hour, this meant a day's travel could last up to ten hours.
  About 40,000 of the travelers were children.  Unless they were babies, they walked alongside the wagons and worked just like adults.  Their jobs included herding animals, driving wagons, washing dishes, helping with meals, watching younger children, and collecting firewood and "buffalo chips" (dry buffalo manure, which could be used to start fires if there was no firewood).
  At night, the group would move the wagons into a circle ("circle the wagons") and put their animals inside the circle.  This kept them from wandering away, or being killed or stolen.  If the weather was dry, people slept outside.  If it was wet, people slept under their wagons.
  Many travelers were very afraid of attacks from Native Americans.  However, most Native Americans left the travelers alone, or even helped them by trading with them and helping them cross rivers in canoes.  When Native Americans did attack travelers, the stories were told over and over again, which may have made attacks seem more common than they actually were.
  Travelers who did reach Oregon looked back on the Trail with different feelings.  One man named Loren Hastings said in 1847: 
  I look back upon the long, dangerous and precarious emigrant road with a degree of romance and pleasure; but to others it is the graveyard of their friends.
caption: Breaking up Camp at Sunrise, by Alfred Jacob Miller
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