A Lunchtime Conversation – True Grit on the Oregon Trail

She sits on the tongue of the wagon with her back to us. We cannot see her face, but by the way she slumps forward, we know she is weary – perhaps even in despair. This emigrant woman on the Oregon Trail is waiting for her husband, who went off to search for water.

He had unyoked the oxen, and the wagon wheels lay on the ground beside his hammer and blacksmithing tools. When he comes back, he’ll shim the metal rims back tight against the wooden wheels until they reach a place with enough water to soak the wood tight again. He has to do this every day, sometimes more than once, depending upon the kind of ground they come upon.

They are not “no account” people. They had owned a farm in Illinois until the banks failed and nothing was worth what it had been. The only choice was to sell what they could and leave everything they knew. That was as hard as the times that had come down upon them.

They aren’t alone in this fix. People from all over the country and even from all over the world are doing the same. Many of them are on this same trail walking to good green country in Oregon. They talk different, but otherwise, she allows, they are pretty much the same.

She and her husband have been walking beside the wagon for five months now, on the Southern route of the Oregon Trail. They call it the Applegate Trail after that poor family that capsized coming down the Columbia and got their sons drowned. It was good of them to come back after reaching comfort in the Willamette Valley to find a safer trail west and to spare other families the same tragedy.

In the next six weeks, they will walk across the Great Basin, a fearful land of high desert and higher mountains, long on dust and short on water. They have to get there before winter sets in. On a good day, they cover 15 miles.

She keeps her kitchen toolbox, butter churn and flour barrel set neatly by the wagon when the wheels are off. We hope that her good dishes are still packed in the flour barrel. Castoff items littering the trail nearby show that other emigrant women were not lucky enough to keep even a few pretty things from home.

Her baby cries inside the wagon, where we can see a quilt, made during her easier life. We know she’ll tend to the child before unpacking her dishes box and sets to fixing lunch. But right now, she just needs a moment.

At the Spirit of the West exhibit, we are privileged to share that moment with her and to witness her grit and gumption to do whatever is necessary, no matter how hard. The Living History volunteer who portrays the emigrant woman, dressed in period clothing and surrounded by authentic artifacts, is just one of the people visitors may encounter in the Hall of Exploration and Settlement.

Every day, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., a different character is in one of eight re-created 1880s scenes, from a settlement town and fur trader encampment to a placer mine. They subtly invite conversations about their stories – by what is seen and often, more powerfully, by what is unseen.

Written by Living History Volunteer Susie Linford.