(This post was written by my cousin, Rene Rodgers, and posted with her permission)
In 1845 the Allen family was well-established in Platte County, Missouri. James M Allen, his wife Hannah, and 18 month-old son Cyrus were living there, as were his parents Isaac and Margaret Allen, siblings, grandmother and aunts & uncles. The 1840 US Census confirms that Hannah’s parents, Nancy and James B Riggs, and her 9 brothers & sisters also lived on a nearby farm.
Young James Allen - who was 23 in the Spring of 1845 - never recorded why he made the decision to move his family over 2200 miles, crossing the plains and the Rocky Mountains to settle in Oregon. Perhaps he dreamed of obtaining rich farmland or finding new business opportunities. Or maybe his father-in-law, James Riggs, made the decision to go West and encouraged James to do the same. Most women were primarily interested in stability, in making a home, and raising their children properly. For the women, these were childbearing years – one out of every five adult females who traveled the trail was pregnant, and nearly every married woman had small children in tow. So the decision to uproot the family and take them across the country was nearly always made by a man. Hannah Allen not only had her toddler Cyrus, but she was pregnant as well. It’s not likely that going to Oregon was her idea!
People made the journey westward for many reasons; however, setting out on the Oregon Trail was not an easy decision. Travelers were inspired by dreams of rich farmlands, but they were also motivated by difficult economic times in the east and diseases like tuberculosis, typhoid, yellow fever and malaria that were decimating the Midwest around 1837. In the relatively crowded East, unsanitary conditions allowed diseases like cholera to flourish. In the 1830s an epidemic of cholera was carried to America by infected rats and humans on passenger ships and, by 1850, the disease was killing 30,000 people a year. But the sickness that was most responsible was “Oregon Fever”.
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| Map showing the Oregon Trail, Oregon Country, and northern Mexico http://www.ushistory.org/us/29b.asp |
Financial reasons, like starting businesses and escaping debt, were motivations, as well. Many emigrants traveled to Oregon to escape debt caused by the Panic of 1837. That financial crisis was triggered when Andrew Jackson tore down the Second National Bank. People rushed to the bank to take out their savings, but the bank ran out of money. The aftermath resulted in a Depression that shriveled the value of land and the price of crops, and wages that fell 30 to 50 percent. By 1842, the American Economy had been pushed to rock bottom. Landowners couldn’t meet mortgage payments, and farmers could find fewer and fewer reasons not to leave for better lands. They followed the example of their ancestors to seek a home in a new country as a sure way of bettering their condition.
Business opportunities abounded for blacksmiths, innkeepers, shopkeepers, flour mills, masons, printers, and more. But for the most part, the emigrants were farmers – family men with wives and children – who were seeking a promised land of milk and honey. In 1842 the US government passed a Preemption Bill that allowed an Oregon Territory farmer to “squat” on a piece of property; making improvements while he lived there gave the farmer first rights to purchase the land once it was surveyed. Later, the Donation Land Law of 1850 provided up to 640 acres of land to families willing to settle there.
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| Title page, The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California, written by Lansford Hastings, and published in 1845 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lansford_Hastings |
Whatever his reasons were, James Miller Allen made the momentous decision to pack up his young family and make the journey overland to Oregon. And in preparation for the trek, James would certainly need some things that money couldn’t buy. In the words of the Reverend Yantis, “I would lay in a good stock of patience and perseverance.” (Quoted in Eaton, The Overland Trail, pg 10)
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