Craters of the Moon Historic Context Statements

Overland Travel in the Craters of the Moon Region, 1852-1904:
OVERVIEW OF OVERLAND TRAVEL ON THE SNAKE RIVER PLAIN

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a mass migration transformed the American West, forever changing a region composed mostly of Indians and Hispanics living in small villages and tribal communities. Neither uniform nor steady, migration brought diverse groups of people to the West, such as Anglo Americans, European immigrants, black Americans, Mexican immigrants, and Chinese, all of whom formed migration streams flowing north, east and west. For all of this diversity, however, Anglo Americans dominated western migration, a fact which only slightly simplifies a complex process, especially when it comes to generalizing about who migrants were, why they migrated, and where they migrated. [1]

Broadly speaking, most settlers were native-born, white farmers from middle-class backgrounds. They could not only afford to migrate and establish new farms, but they also had a family history of migrating. Not all migrants were farmers, a good many headed west during the California Gold Rush of 1849 and subsequent mineral rushes, which washed over sections of the Far West like flash floods. These migrants wanted to accumulate property--in the form of precious metals--rather than create a new home. Similarly, migration patterns tended to correlate with larger cycles of the American economy. Periods of rapid growth led to large increases in western settlement and the expansion of farming, while periods of depression led to declines in migration and the number of new farms. Still other Americans, such as the Mormons, migrated for reasons of religious freedom. A final and constant migration pattern or trait, one which applied to all emigrant groups, was mobility. Americans of all backgrounds were a restless lot, frequently on the move. These characteristics in turn influenced where people migrated, for they did not spread out evenly across the trans-Missouri West. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, emigrants in search of farms flowed in streams from east to west flooding the agricultural lands bordering the Pacific Coast in Oregon and California and near the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Gold Rush migrants, on the other hand, headed to the mountains of California, and over the next several decades spread out through the mountains of Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and South Dakota. Around the 1880s, land-hungry emigrants began inundating the Great Plains, taking up farms for the first time in what had once been considered the "Great American Desert." But even with this change of course, emigrants left vast portions of the Great Basin, an inhospitable desert, unsettled. Instead, with the advent of irrigation projects around the turn of the century, they favored the inland empire north of the Great Basin--eastern Oregon and Washington and southern Idaho. [2]

One of the most significant chapters in western migration was the overland migration to Oregon and California, the longest journey of its kind ventured by American settlers. The Oregon Trail (with its various alternates and cutoffs to California) extended for some four hundred miles across southern Idaho, and served as the primary route for emigrants traveling through this region. The trail took migrants along the rim of the Snake River and across the Snake River Plain, one of the most difficult stretches of the route. The route itself had been explored and traveled by fur traders, explorers, and missionaries beginning around 1810, preparing the way for the first Midwestern farmers and settlers heading west in 1840. New possibilities awaited them at their destinations in the fertile valleys of Oregon or the mineral-rich mountains of California. Thus, they avoided lingering for long on the plain, finding little enticement in the heat, sage and sand to change their plans. [3]

Emigration started slowly. The long route from Missouri offered few amenities at first. Among the earliest and most important to appear on the Snake River Plain were the fur trade posts of Fort Hall and Fort Boise. Built between 1834 and 1836, they were converted into emigrant supply centers once the beaver trade declined. Trail improvements encouraged travel as well. By 1843, travelers were able to drive wagons west of Fort Hall, and by 1860 more than 53,000 people had crossed the trail to Oregon and more than 200,000 to California. During the 1860s, the flow of emigrants slowed for a short time, then surged between 1862 and 1866, for a total of some 125,000 emigrants-- constituting the longest unbroken migration wave over the Oregon-California Trail. With the end of the Civil War and the arrival of the transcontinental railroad on the plains, overland travel steadily declined. [4]

During these later waves, emigrants rushed to find gold in western Montana and southern Idaho. The interest in Idaho mines was coupled with a fear of Indian conflicts, which led to the use of alternate routes across the Snake River Plain, an important one being Goodale's Cutoff. Although most overlanders viewed the remote lava landscape of the plain as a sterile and hostile environment, some settled in the new mining communities, such as the Boise Basin, in the 1860s. Over the next two decades, the emigrant road and its branches in southern Idaho were used for stock driving, freight and stage lines to mines and remote communities, as well as emigrant travel. By 1880, rail service replaced most of these routes, yet some still provided access to outlying mining and farming areas until the turn of the century. [5]