Читать книгу Highways and Highway Transportation - George R. Chatburn - Страница 40

Commemorative of the Astorian Expedition organized June 23, 1810, by John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. This Expedition discovered the Oregon Trail which spread knowledge of the Nebraska country leading to its occupancy by white people.

John Jacob Astor’s purpose in organizing the Pacific Fur Company, a subsidiary of the American Fur Company, was to establish himself and American control in the already disputed Oregon country.[34] As a result two expeditions were fitted out to go to and establish trading posts in Oregon with a central control or main post at Astoria. One of these expeditions went by water around Cape Horn to “carry out the people, stores, ammunition and merchandise, requisite for establishing a fortified trading post at the mouth of the Columbia River.” The other “conducted by Mr. Hunt, was to proceed up the Missouri, and across the Rocky Mountains, to the same point: exploring a line of communication across the continent, and noting the place where interior trading posts might be established.”[35]

The overland expedition, consisting of about sixty men with four boats left their winter quarters in Missouri and proceeded up the river in the spring of 1811. They deviated somewhat from Lewis and Clark’s route by leaving the Missouri River at the mouth of the Grand River, near where the Pacific extension of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul railroad crosses. They seem to have gone across the country north of the Black Hills into Wyoming to the Wind River and Wind Mountains south of the Yellowstone Park, using present-day terms for locations; thence a short distance to the head waters of the Snake River, a part of the Lewis and Clark route, which with some deviations they followed to the Columbia. At the mouth of the Columbia they met the sea party, and on July 28, 1812, a party of six men started back with dispatches. They wintered near Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska, having crossed the mountains substantially along the line afterwards known as the Oregon Trail. In the spring of 1813 they continued down the Platte to the Missouri. This trip proved the possibility of a direct route avoiding the long roundabout journey by way of the headwaters of the Missouri River. The evolution of the Oregon Trail has been summarized by Albert Watkins, Historian of the Nebraska State Historical Society, in Collections, Vol. XVI, p. 26, as follows:[36]

The Missouri Fur Company sent an expedition of 150 men to the upper waters of the Missouri in 1809. The powerful and ferocious Black Feet Indians, who were the providence of the Oregon Trail, discouraged the attempts of these men to gain permanent foothold there. Part of them retreated and another part, headed by the intrepid Henry, crossed the mountain divide in the fall of 1810 and established Fort Henry on Henry’s Fork of the Snake River. This was the beginning of the southern movement. In 1821 Pilcher, who succeeded Lisa as head of the Missouri Fur Company, made another attempt at a foothold in the Black Feet country, but was forced back. Ashley, leader of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, organized in 1822, was also beaten back in 1823. By this time Henry was discouraged about holding on to the upper Missouri and turned his attention to permanent exploitation of the Green River valley. In that year Provost made the important discovery of South Pass. In 1824, Ashley conducted an expedition to the lower fields along the regular trail except that he went to Council Bluff and from there west up the Platte Valley. In 1830, his great lieutenants, Smith, Jackson and Sublette, went west with a train of fourteen wagons—the first to go to the mountains over the cut-off; that is, up the Little Blue valley to its head, across to the Platte, following the river to the mountains. In 1832 Bonneville also went over the cut-off and took a wagon train over the South Pass, the first wagons to cross the mountains. In 1832 Nathaniel Wyeth went over the cut-off to Oregon, but did not take wagons over the mountainous part of the course. In 1836 Marcus Whitman, one of the intrepid winners and founders of Oregon, went almost through to the Columbia with a wagon, thus demonstrating and illustrating the practicability of a transcontinental road for all purposes. The Oregon Trail was now clearly outlined. It was thoroughly established in 1842 by the aggressive Oregon emigration.