Last updated: March 12, 2021
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Transportation: Cars on the Oregon Trail
Photo/ Wikimedia Commons
Twentieth Century Wagon Trails
The historic Oregon Trail was not abandoned with the advent of the transcontinental railroad and automobiles. Some travelers continued to take wagons over the old trail as late as the 1920s. Why? Usually because they didn’t have the money to buy train tickets to take their families west, or they had livestock that needed herding along, but sometimes just because they loved the old-timey adventure of it. In the early twentieth century, families traveling by wagon occasionally ran into motor vehicles out on the trail – and occasionally, a Model T or other motorcar ran into them. Literally. Drivers didn’t expect to encounter wagons out there, and at least one driver who rear-ended a wagon was judged to be “drunker than a hoot owl.”
Charles and Ralph Thompson’s family, driving a horse-drawn Studebaker wagon from Colorado to Oregon in 1923, met up with a Black family driving cross-country in a brand new Cadillac touring car. The motorists, city folks, said they were “scared to death of cougars” and asked permission to camp near the Thompsons for the night. Permission was granted, and Charles and Ralph’s father fired a shotgun once or twice during the night to scare off yammering coyotes and assure the camp-neighbors they were safe. As both families continued on the next day, the Thompsons used their horses to pull the Caddy out of a snowbank, but soon the motorcar pulled ahead and drove out of site down the trail.
The image above is a 1928 photograph of Ezra Meeker, shortly before his death at age 97, with his “Prairie Schooner-mobile.” Meeker, who first crossed the Oregon Trail with his wife and baby son in 1852, grew worried in his later years that the trail was being lost to memory. To raise publicity and funds for locating, marking, and commemorating the Oregon Trail, he retraced that journey twice (1906-1908 and 1910-1912) with an ox-drawn wagon, once (in 1916, at age 85) with this Pathfinder automobile, and later (1924) he flew over it in an airplane.