Fourteen or so years ago I submitted a question to Cecil and actually got a reply from CKDexterHaven that my question was gonna be passed along to Cecil, with others, for possible answering in the column. He warned that the process could take years though. I’ve pretty much given up at this point so here goes, as I wrote it back then:
Growing up in Nebraska, I had the historical significance of the Oregon Trail drilled into my head from an early age. But even then I wondered about the logic of the whole thing: why did all these pioneers/settlers drive wagons right through untold acres of what is now known to be just about the best farmland on the planet, in order to get to a decent but relatively insignificant swath of land well over a thousand miles and several treacherous mountain ranges away? Was the Willamette Valley’s P.R. just that good and Nebraska’s just that bad?
The primary reason seems to be the timing of the laws authorizing the settlement of those lands.
The Oregon Territory was homesteaded by the Donation Land Claim Act of 1950. The lands the Oregon Trail ran through were initially homesteaded by the Homestead Act of 1862.
Oregon Territory already had a degree of American settlement before the Donation Land Claim Act was approved, and that constituency appeared to be able to influence the passing of that law. The Homestead Act lands were largely unsettled by whites before the act was passed.
Note, too that a lot of the Oregon Trail in the Plains runs through Kansas, which was already actively in the process of settlement, but not with the specific encouragement of homesteading acts. So those lands weren’t essentially free for the asking. Kansas and Nebraska Territories in particular were settled under the auspices of the Preemption Act of 1841, which allowed US citizen settlers to settle in those territories and purchase from the federal government up to 160 acres at $1.25 per acre. Kansas settlement was accelerated by the race between pro-slavery and pro-abolition settlers to populate the territory as fast as possible, to force admission to the Union as either a slave or free state.
The Great Plains has a topsoil layer like iron. Until Cyrus McCormick developed a plow blade that could penetrate it that the land was considered a desert.
(If anyone remembers Alastair Cooke’s America)
The arid area of the west starts roughly in the middle of Nebraska and basically continues until you get to western Oregon:
Promoters often tried to convince settlers otherwise, leading to disaster when there were several dry years in a row.
Which raises the question of why they travelled there by covered wagon instead of just packing the family into the Chevy and taking Highway 20. 
As non-North American can you put this into context for me:
How many days travel did it take them to get the perfectly fine Nebraska farmland from back East?
Where was the nearest port / railhead / major town to which they could send their produce?
It turns out that whole Oregon Trail thing was a disaster:
(This is one of my favorite xkcd’s and I only played that game once or twice.)
In addition to the tough, tangle of roots, the soil tended to clump forcing the farmer to stop every few minutes to knock it off his iron plow. Most people credit John Deere with inventing the steel plow, so it’s nice to see credit given where credit is due, though some dude named John Lane is also credited with the steel plow. But I think they were all stealing ideas from one another back then anyway.
A lot of us don’t fully appreciate just how labor intensive farming is today let alone prior to the age of mechanical farming.
Maybe they went that way because there were no real roads. The first actual scenic route.
Not sure how relevant this is to Nebraska, but I recall hearing about the settlement of the Canadian Prairies.
Palliser surveyed the area from 1857 to 1859, (“Palliser’s triangle”) called it an extension of the US praries and a very arid region with very limited agricultural potential, delaying interest in expanding there for decades. Then the CPR (Canadian Pacific Railroad) came through in the 1880’s (mainly to cement British Columbia into Canada before the dastardly Yanks tried to pull a California on us) to find a lush area excellent for growing crops.
Palliser happened to traverse the region at the tail end of a major dry cycle in the climate. The CPR in the mid-1880’s was laid through the prairies in the middle of a wet cycle in the climate. Needless to say, the dry cycle seems to have repeated in the 1930’s (Grapes of Wrath, anyone?) and again in the 1980’s.
I assume the same issues plagued the US central high plains about the same time? Oregon wet, Nebraska dry?
How great is it without access to the Ogallala, modern pumps and centre-pivot irrigation?
I guess we’ll find out in a few years…
I was going to bring up the moisture issue too.
Dry land farming without irrigation is certainly possible. At least in non-drought years and assuming you’re doing it mostly for subsistence, not for sale to distant markets. It’s land area-intensive, but that part of the country was nothing but land; it was everything else that was scarce.
But that kind of farming is very different from that practiced in Europe or the eastern USA. Which is the only kind of farming the settlers had experience with.
Lotta folks died while failing to learn how to do that fast enough. Meanwhile, others pressed on to Oregon where the growing conditions were more like where they’d grown up.
In addition to all of the above, the Native population of the Williamette Valley had been all but wiped out by the 1830s, with the remaining tribes ceding their land to the US government in the 1850s. Whereas the plains Natives continued to have a significant – and sometimes aggressive – presence well into the late 19th century.
I’ve read that the thinking went, since there are no trees growing on the prairie, settlers and surveyors believed this indicates poor soil compared to forested lands.
I find this difficult to believe. Rich black topsoil in places like Iowa or Nebraska, the equal to any on the planet running 3 or 4 feet thick in places had to capture people’s attention, it isn’t as if agriculture or growing a garden was a new endeavor. Doesn’t pass the smell test. They didn’t know what good topsoil was?
In most places, they couldn’t get to it because of the deep tangle of prairie grass root systems.
And the water issue was well known. The Plains were colloquially referred to the Great American Desert, which is not a name to inspire a great desire to plow and plant a hundred acres and watch it wither.
All pertinent factors, surely.
Here’s a question: okay, rainfall was less than one might like but I can personally attest–not to bolster Nebraska’s dubious claim to have more miles of river than any other state–that the eastern side of the state at least is loaded with year-round rivers and streams, many of them sizeable. They didn’t know about the underground freshwater ocean and it wouldn’t’ve mattered anyway, but would riverine irrigation have been too difficult? Surely they knew about that.
The eastern end of the state has rivers. What makes you think it wasn’t already settled?
Indeed.
One route of the Oregon Trail jumped off from Omaha, smack in the Missouri River valley area. That part of the territory (or state, later) was well settled and being farmed well enough to sustain the area. (Not to mention being on a major navigable river meant commerce opportunities as well.)
It’s the rest of the high dry prairie that was being bypassed.
Sure, but that’s a bit different than claiming if there aren’t any trees growing the soil isn’t suitable for agriculture. That just doesn’t make sense. The irrigation problem is a factor in the arid parts but there isn’t any irrigation necessary to speak of in much of the midwest.