Check out questions 5 and 7. If you were forced to go back in time and travel the Oregon Trail with only the resources available in that time, wouldn’t you go about it completely differently than most? Admittedly, some of those pioneers were packing heavy tools of the trade to set themselves up with a smithy or a farm out west, but not all were. There are many accounts of furniture, books, and cast iron stoves left by the wayside. Mostly what they packed was food. Nearly 2,000 lbs work for a family. And they needed so much food because they traveled at the pace of an ox-drawn wagon, and they needed that wagon because they had to haul so much food. Damn, circular reasoning!
I’m coming at this from the perspective of an ultralite hiker. Less load/smart load = less stress and faster travel. If you travel on horseback with a small string of horses or ponies, you’re faster, and you don’t have to take nearly as much food, and you can distribute the loads amongst your string. This would have been cheaper than a prairie schooner and yolks of oxen. Check out FAQ #7 if you didn’t already. Those wagons were a pain in the ass! Inadequate brakes, so they had to resort to rigged-up log drags during descents. They had to winch them up inclines, dig them out of mud, caulk them and ford river crossings; they might as well have dragged an anchor. Faster travel by horse back, apart from the pace, results simple from horses handling the terrain FAR better than any wagon or ox. No one ever had to stop and fell a tree for a horse. Also, with a shorter travel time, your window for good weather and available water is much better.
So wouldn’t a small group lightly outfitted with essentials, traveling with a string of ponies, at both a faster and more continuous pace be the thinking man’s preferred method of travel? It’s not like you won’t have valuables for trade when you arrive. Skills weigh nothing, and you can trade the horses that survive. Yes, I know some did just that, but it seems to me the vast majority chose the slowest, most dangerous, pain-in-the-ass way.
You’re looking at it from the perspective of an ultralight hiker who gets to go home again at the end of your trip. These people were going across the wilderness knowing they would never come back and that where they were going they were going to start their lives over again with only what they brought with them. There wasn’t an IKEA or Wal-Mart waiting on the other end of that trail for them to sell them new books or a stove.
Not only hindsight but from a hundred years into the future.
People didn’t know what the journey would be like or what awaited them when they reached their journey’s end. Many also had familes, children and the elderly, who needed the covered wagon for shelter, for sitting in and sleeping in during the day. They also needed the wagons for the ‘circle the wagons’ moments. Your scenario might work okay for single men or maybe couples who are young and childless, but most people were not like that.
This. You show up in 1850’s wilderness Oregon with nothing but some worn out boots – where are you going to get your supplies? I assume you’re homesteading, because there’s no other good reason to make the trip. It’s not like anyone else is going to sell you the nails and tools and farming implements and oxen that they personally dragged 3,000 miles across the continent in exchange for your “skills” (the skills that are valuable in homesteading are probably not all that rare – you basically have to be willing to do backbreaking work for 16 hours/day for 7 days/week).
This is what I was thinking as well. If you’re gonna farm, you need your tractors unless you want to try your luck capturing and taming young bison (which still might not work, otherwise why didn’t the Indians already harness them?).
But otherwise I can totally see the OP’s point. Best bet IMHO would be to get 4 or 5 families together, leave the household goods and the old and very young folks behind, at least initially, hook up a gobload of oxen per wagon and move out. At about the halfway mark you send a group of dudes on horseback with shovels & axes to scout out and prepare a landing zone of dugout houses & corrals on one of the homesteads. Develop that homestead first and then once settled, maybe the following year, develop the others. Bascially, exploit economy of scale to some extent to improve the odds of survival for that first year or two and then let everyone get all independant. Sending out 10 or so families in a train, all with the intent of setting up 10 independant farms simultaneously, strikes me as crazy bad planning.
There was at least one pioneer train that used hand carts instead of horse or ox drawn wagons. I know that from a historical insert into an old comic book. The thing you didn’t leave without was other people, unless you had already gone back and forth enough times to know the details of the trail. Then, being Mr. Wilderness, you could ride a horse and lead a pack mule. And take your rifle.
I have no idea how long a stretch there might be with no water. If it was necessary to carry barrels of water, that might mean that if you wanted to walk, you’d want to walk next to someone else’s wagon.
I agree with everyone who’s said that the wagons were moving vans and portable shelters. And it might be pertinent that the only deadline was when would winter close the passes and how long would the food last. No one was trying to shave off a few days or weeks so that they could get back to the office before their vacation time ran out.
In addition to the above, people were often led to believe (by people that had no idea of reality) that the trail was a piece of cake. The Rockies and the Cascades are no picnic to cross, and when you do get to the other side, there’s the Columbia Gorge to deal with. Innumerable times, pioneers had to lower their wagons down steep hillsides using deadfalls to slow them down. And that’s after having to haul them up in the first place. A cast iron stove would get dumped after very few of those efforts, along with granny’s piano.
If I wanted to go west to be a gold miner I’d travel light. If I wanted to settle somewhere with my family and start a farm I’d get the wagon and take everything I could with me. These people were uprooting their lives, leaving their families behind, and wanted to carry all their posessions with them, those were the only connections to their past.
Yeah, I get that the farmer needs his oxen and implements, but hunters/trappers, doctors, barbers, guides, missionaries, and tradesmen traveled the Oregon Trail too. That’s what I mean by skills. Not everyone was a sodbuster, but it seems the vast majority chose to travel like sodbusters.
The Mormon handcart pioneers had more of a minimalist approach toward western migration, but their survival rate wasn’t much better. And they only had to make it to Utah!
Although something else to consider is that estimates of death rates on the trail vary quite a lot. The 10% on the BLM site you linked to is towards the high end of these. Most are closer to 4-6%, which isn’t that much more than the general background mortality rate of the 1840’s US. A lot of the “dangers of the trail” were really just dangers of living in that time period.
Contrary to the video game (at least when I played it in school), the vast majority of wagon parties made it through just fine, cast iron stoves and all. The death rate mostly reflects the death of individual party members, mostly from disease and more commonly children and the elderly, not Donner-party style disasters where the most of a group perished.
I don’t know what others were doing. Doctors probably had a little money and want to keep their posssessions, some tradesmen might have a sizable number of tools. I wouldn’t think barbers would need to carry that much unless they brought a fancy chair with them (if they used those things back then).
However, another thing to consider was that a good solid wagon like the famous Conestoga was an investment. Just like cars now they depreciate over time, but they were valuable. Where ever they would be going wagons and their parts would be needed. The axles, wheel bearings, and wheels themselves would be very valuable.
On top of that, it’s a long trip. If you have to stop to hunt and gather food it’s going to take even longer. If you arrive with just the clothes on your back it’s going to take you some time to get started, hard enough when you were one of the first to arrive, but I think increasingly difficult later as communities grew, they probably weren’t eager to take in more homeless people no matter what the potential, they needed goods from back east and someone walking into town empty-handed wasn’t a valuable addition.
Just wanted to add - horses are surprisingly fragile creatures compared to cattle. That’s the big reason farmers preferred oxen.
Horses can die from a stomach ache or from a stone in their hooves that maybe you don’t notice for a couple hours leading to laminitis (cows can get laminitis too, but it’s more deadly in horses because of the way their blood circulation works). Plus, a horse’s instinct when it’s frightened is to freak out and run away. OTOH, It takes a lot to freak out an ox.
One person with a string of horses is going to have to devote several hours a day just to grooming the horses and making sure they have the right kind of food to eat so they don’t get sick. If they do get sick (and no kidding - horses stand around at night dreaming up stupid ways to hurt themselves) you’re basically screwed.
This makes me laugh. My experience with horses and horse people leads me to believe horses are on the brink of sapience–they’re almost smart enough to create a civilization because they’re already smart enough to worry about stuff to the extent they can become completely useless.
In addition to the impracticality of carrying young kids or old people on horses, what did a string of 4 or 5 horses cost compared to a wagon and team of oxen?
Also, please do not attempt to tame a bison as a beast of burden.