If you find this topic… interesting… you should watch Enemy At The Gates. (Or just search for Enemy at the Gates sex scene).
That’s not a problem. Women were not allowed to enjoy it until the late 1960s.
As an SCA Constable, I assure you, many people don’t bother waiting, or keeping the noise down.
I thought lots of bullets was the way to go…
BTW, the OP mentions circling the wagon every night. Nope they didn’t do that. They only circled the wagons when they felt threatened. Too much work to do it. Most of the time they just stopped the wagons and camped in line. That is, when they were in line. On the wide open prairies, they usually spread out so they weren’t directly behind the wagon in front so as not to have to eat their dust.
SCA people are…different.
- While on an airplane, make a tent out of a flight blanket, and then join the mile high club.
Here’s one of these questions that helps to show the difference between men and women. 
As opposed to the RenFaire folks who put a sign up with performance times and charge admission to watch 
I once read an account of one of the Oregon Trail wagon trains. One of the women on the train was quite active. The article referred to her as a “nymphomaniac” but whether that would be considered official is not clear.
Anyway, she spent a lot of time with various men in the party, including married men, and trouble ensued. She was eventually expelled from the train.
So, yes, sex happened. And other people noticed it.
Being tired and dirty has little effect on people’s sex drives.
Surely you didn’t still trade the pelts in this version?
Back to the tents, I recall going to the museum and seeing Mongolian yurts. One half of the yurt was for the hubby / dad. Other half was for the mom and kids. So I am guessing when hubby wanted his wife she walked over to his half made a baby and then if he chose to kick her out of his bed, she would walk or crawl back to her half. This would be done discreetly not to wake the kids. But hey the kids would have seen goats and sheep and ox fornicating, so nothing out of the ordinary.
Real privacy is a very modern conceit. What do you think people did for rest stops in the wide open prairies? Or if it was unsafe to venture alone into the woods?
In most bodily functions, if necessary, people just looked the other way provided the performance was not blatant and exhibitionist.
I think that’s different, at least from a 21st century perspective. I don’t think I would have a problem saying that I have to (to females) go use the “little boys room” over in the bushes, or (to males) take a leak.
It would be different to announce to a group of thirty that you and the wife had to go “scavenge for food” or something similar. One dunce in the group wouldn’t get the idea and offer to go along and help. It seems that you would have to scream that you wanted to go fuck your wife for everyone to understand and leave you alone.
I’ve been camping with mixed company and people are just pretty quiet about it.
Worst video game expansion pack ever.
Seriously, it’s a little odd to single out the Oregon Trail. Only in the last hundred years or so have the majority of people had the kind of privacy that we nowadays think is appropriate for sex regularly. One or two room houses were the norm. Hell, they still are outside of first world countries. We’ve had threads around here where people discuss listening to their college roommate have sex while in the room and writing it off as no big deal.
I think the thing that throws people is the fact that people back then were, on the one hand, so much less open about sex, so much more concerned about the sexes being kept separate, so much more concerned about nudity, so much more concerned about the appearance of sexual propriety, etc., but on the other hand, so much less concerned with sexual privacy.
Hard for the modern mind to reconcile.
Well, yeah. Especially since we are talking about people who are probably also seriously bored on top of everything else.
Especially then.
Dopers must be a sheltered lot. Never mind, one room families in poor places, I remember taking a sleeper train in Holland a few years ago and the couple in he bunk below mine went at it, quite loudly all bloody night.
Fine old Yankee tradition - “here you two lovebirds, go sleep in the same bed but no hanky panky…”
In the wagons, per “Wagons West” series. Also implied by Michener in his fictional “Centennial.” Then of course, the wagoneers wintered in semi-permanent cabins so there might have been more births the following September.