EMIGRANTS ROLL ALONG THE NORTH PLATTE RIVER

Familiar to most who have studied about the Oregon Trail is CHIMNEY ROCK

The old Oregon Trail is studied by most people with a beginning at Independence on the Missouri River, today a part of the Kansas City extended area. The emigrant's route followed the Missouri north and veered westward along the Platte River. From its headwaters in Jackson County, Colorado, near the border of Wyoming, a rugged site in the Rocky Mountains., the river now known as the North Platte had merged with the lesser South Platte near today's town of North Platte, more than 700 miles later,  and flowed eastward as one. Thus, the pioneers were traveling upstream all the time, whether headed for the Columbia River or toward California on the South Platte.

 On the North Platte most made a small jog southward to avoid Lake McConaughy. then a swampy area, and continued northwesterly along fairly agreeable terrain to today's Bridgeport, crossing the Sidney -Deadwood gold trail (Hwy #385 now) mentioned in an earlier blog. From there to the familiar crags of Scott's Bluff, where an easy pass through the increasingly rising lands and rugged buttes had been found a few miles south of the North Platte, the travel become more difficult.

Familiar to anyone reading about the pioneers and the Oregon Trail or Mormon Trail are rock formations such as Chimney Rock and the Scott's Bluff itself.  Indians plagued some trains, more curious and interested in what objects or foods they could get from the trains than in killing the emigrants. With dread of the Indians and misinformation the emigrants were not the friendliest of travelers, either. One might feel sad that the early mingling of two (or more) racial groups and cultures that the days did not go better. An Indian friend of mine once commented to me that displacement of one people by another had been going on forever. I am not sure that makes it any easier to bear.

Disease and accidents were big killers of emigrants, lack of food and water, too, with virtually no medical care among the travelers. Well-known are accounts of throwing away of much too heavy furnishings along the trail or of the breakdown of over-challenged horses or oxen (pioneers found that slow oxen proved more durable than fast horses). So it was when the emigrants began to reach the upper limits of the Plains and face the rugged country between them and the Columbia River of Oregon and the green, watered pastures of the Willamette country.

What few accounts of the trails relate is the unusual land adjacent to the North Platte route -- the Sand Hills of Nebraska. See the next blog.