What Was Life Like on a Wagon Train Heading West?

For 19th-century migrants traveling west across America by wagon train, every mile tested body and spirit. Blistered feet, choking dust and swarming insects posed just a few of the many physical challenges of the 2,000-mile, months-long journey traversing plains, mountains and deserts. Yet amid the hardships, the pioneers who rolled across the continent also experienced moments of awe: brilliant sunsets over endless plains, vast unbroken landscapes and the unfamiliar faces that marked each new frontier.

Some pioneers left accounts of their journeys. In June 1846, westward migrant and future editor of the Oregon Spectator George Curry lamented, “I am tired of the snail-like travel of the wagons.” That same month, Massachusetts school teacher Tamsen Eustis Donner, who traveled with her husband George and their five daughters in what would become known as the ill-fated Donner Party, marveled in her diary that “the prairie between the Blue and Platte rivers is beautiful beyond description.” Both accounts appear in Overland in 1846: Diaries and Letters of the California-Oregon Trail, historian Dale L. Morgan’s 1963 compendium of pioneer writings.

“The journey was exciting and felt historically important because you were fulfilling this American mythology of moving overland West,” says Sarah Keyes, curator at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. “But when you’re actually on the trail, you’re waiting at river crossings, dealing with bug bites and often moving very, very slowly.”

Lured by the promise of fertile farmland and a chance to start anew, several hundred thousand men, women and children set out between the 1840s and the 1880s, rolling west in groups of oxen-pulled prairie schooners through grass prairies, arid deserts and over snowy mountain passes, bound for California and Oregon. For later migrants, that dream was further fueled by the federal Homestead Act of 1862, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, which granted 160 acres of land to settlers willing to cultivate it.

Most westward treks began at men’s insistence, with women often joining reluctantly. According to journalist and historian Frank McLynn, author ofWagons West: The Epic Story of America’s Overland Trails, fewer than one in four women who kept journals on the trail agreed with the decision to migrate. “Often, in private diaries women lament, ‘Why are we going on this foolhardy errand, separating ourselves from these networks we have at home that undergird our lives?’” says Stephen Aron, president and CEO of the Autry Museum of the American West and professor emeritus of history at University of California, Los Angeles.

Most migrant families—largely middle-class settlers from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri—set out from Independence, Missouri, the last major outpost on the western frontier, after stocking up on supplies. Early Oregon settler and entrepreneur John Shively suggested in his 1846 guidebook that pioneers pack “plenty of flour and well-cured side bacon to last you through if you can,” “one or two pair of buckskin pantaloons,” “two very wide brimmed hats” and several pairs of coarse shoes or boots.

Timing was of the essence. Leave too early, and risk insufficient grass for the wagon train’s oxen, mules, cattle and horses to feed on. Leave too late, and massive snowstorms made mountains impassable, stranding migrants with dwindling supplies. The sweet spot for starting the journey was mid-April to May, advised Shively and others.

Migrants followed rivers, averaging 20-mile days. They rolled across dry, arid plains past discarded furniture, tossed out to lighten wagons’ load, and through fields of wild tulips, primrose and creeping hollyhock. Further out, they encountered the graves of fellow travelers who’d succumbed to illness or accident. Pioneers accustomed to the forests and farmlands of the Eastern United States often found the wide-open terrain disorienting, says Keyes. “They see shimmering mirages in the distance and can’t identify how far away objects are.”

Men managed wagons and livestock; women mostly walked. The sound of rumbling wagon wheels mixed with the whistling wind, bird calls and the hum of bees and locusts. Men carried firearms and wielded whips to lash out at rattlesnakes slithering onto their path. Snakes crept into beds at night, too.

A typical day involved re-shoeing a horse, repairing a broken wagon axle or tending to sick or injured animals. Wagon wheels needed regular greasing to prevent friction from destroying the bearings. When grease ran out, migrants improvised with buffalo or wolf fat.

Hunting usually fell to men, who provided essential food for the journey. Coming from Kentucky, pioneer Edwin Bryant marveled that “buffalo meat is as ‘plenty as blackberries,’” seeing no less than 1,000 a day, while “antelopes are very abundant, but hard to kill.” Buffalo meat was “so rich, so juicy, it makes the mouth water to think of it,” wrote businessman and migrant Charles Stanton, a member of the Donner Party. Another settler gleefully shared details of one of his meals: “Supped last night on curlew, snipe, plover and duck—that’s a prairie bill of fare for you!”

“Men tend to write about the experience as the adventure of their lives,” says Aron. Women, not so much, since life on the trail mirrored chores back home—cooking, cleaning and childcare—but in harsher conditions.

Women baked bread and hung milk from bouncing wagons to churn butter. They searched for scarce wood for fires and collected buffalo chips, or dried dung, which burned longer. Nights were cramped and restless in a tent or on a thin mattress laid across a wagon’s wooden storage box.

Weather in the wide-open West—dust storms, rain squalls or blizzards—could be unpredictable and dramatic. Parents soothed children terrified by flash floods and thunder that boomed louder on the open plains. Storms could send livestock bolting into the darkness. John Bidwell, one of the first migrants to travel by wagon train from Missouri to California, wrote that he saw hailstones larger than a turkey’s egg. And when 12 inches of rain soaked everything in Amelia Knight’s wagon in 1852 and the pregnant mother of seven from Iowa couldn’t light a fire, the company went to bed supperless, she chronicled in her diary.

Nighttime brought the maddening whining of mosquitos, too. On the Santa Fe Trail in 1846, Susan Shelby Magoffin, who had been born into one of Kentucky’s wealthiest families, wrote in her diary, “millions upon millions were swarming around me, and their knocking against the carriage reminded me of a hard rain. It was equal to any of the plagues of Egypt.”

Migrants faced more perilous plagues, as well. The biggest by far was disease, especially cholera from contaminated water. While overlanders were no more vulnerable than family back home, they lacked ready access to a doctor. Migrants depended on rivers for bathing and drinking water, but treacherous crossings also led to drownings. Runaway wagons, stampedes, broken bones from kicking mules and accidental shootings posed substantial risks, as well.

In the minds of migrants, Native Americans posed a real danger. In reality, the risk was minimal. According to McLynn, only around 4 percent of pioneers who perished on the trail died at the hand of Native Americans. Some tribe members stole migrants’ horses. More often, they served as helpful guides and trading partners. They led pioneers across rivers—some charged 25 cents a wagon—pointed out edible roots and exchanged corn and pumpkins for guns, tobacco and coffee.

“The Indians frequently come to see us,” Tamsen Donner wrote about the Native Americans, “and the chiefs of a tribe breakfasted at our tent this morning. All are so friendly that I cannot help feeling sympathy and friendship for them.”

Later migrants benefitted from trading posts along trails—if they could afford the lofty prices. Pioneers also learned from the nightmarish tale of the Donner party. Only half of the 87 men, women and children who left Springfield, Illinois, for California survived after bad directions, wrong turns and sudden, unprecedented snowstorms left them stranded for weeks. Several survived, purportedly, by turning to cannibalism.

Still, despite the risks, dangers and monotony of the trail, pioneers experienced moments of leisure, community and beauty. At night, families gathered around the fire playing the mandolin, banjo, or accordion and singing.

“Bible sermons on Sundays were common as well—and definitely comforting moments,” Keyes says. Knight wrote in her diary of the happy moment when “one of our hands brought me a beautiful bunch of flowers.”

In the late 1840s, the California Gold Rush turned western trails into crowded, perilous highways. In the decades that followed, the creak of wagon wheels gave way to the whistle of steam as rail lines spread across America, linking east to west. By the mid-1880s, when the last major stretches of the transcontinental rail network had been completed, overland wagon travel all but disappeared. What had once been a grueling, months-long gamble became a journey of days—safe from mosquitos, serpents and storms—as a new generation of pioneers glided westward in the sheltered steel cars of a newly connected nation.