Brave souls traveled west 175 years ago, blazing what would later be the Oregon Trail.
Joseph Meek and Robert Newell knew the landscape of the West by 1840, since both had been working beaver streams throughout the Rockies and beyond for more than a dozen years. They would make their own history by taking the first wagons to Oregon late that fall,
using vehicles that had been discarded by other travelers to the Pacific Northwest.
Earlier that year Joel P. Walker, a man who had helped to pioneer the Santa Fe Trail, set off from Fort Osage for Oregon Country with his wife and five children and three missionaries and their wives. They traveled with an American Fur Company brigade across what would later become Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming. The brigade, led by Andrew Drips, had sixty pack miles, a number of two-wheeled carts and some wagons.
When the group had crossed South Pass, the Walker family and missionaries Philo B. Littlejohn, Harvey Clark and Alvin T. Smith, guided by mountain man Robert Newell, continued west to Fort Hall, a trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company. There they abandoned their wagons, continuing on to The Dalles by using mules to haul their goods. Ultimately they reached Vancouver, where HBC Factor Dr. John McLoughlin agreed to provide them with supplies for their first year of living in the region.
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