Emigrant Trail

Emigrant Trail

The Emigrant Trails were the northern networks of overland wagon trails throughout the American West, used by emigrants from the eastern United States to settle lands west of the Interior Plains during the overland migrations of the mid-19th century. The proper (both words capitalized) term specifically applies to the overlap of three interrelated routes: the Oregon Trail (from the 1830s), Mormon Trail (from 1846), and California Trail (from 1841). A separate route was the Santa Fe Trail from 1822.

Settlers following these 'Westward ways' were spurred by various motives, among them including persecuted Mormons seeking freedom of religion, settlers seeking the acquisition of new western lands in the Oregon Territory and the lands opened by the settlement treaty ending the Mexican-American War of 1846 in the new U.S. territory of California (and then fueled by the 1848 discovery of gold). Historians have estimated at least 500,000 emigrants used these three trails from 1843–1869, and despite growing competition from transcontinental railroads, some use continued into the early twentieth-century. The trip was arduous, fraught with risks from infectious diseases, dehydration, injury, malnutrition, and harsh weather, with up to one-tenth dying along the way, usually due to disease.