On the Trail: Farewell Bend, Huntington, Oregon

America is full of history and the Oregon Trail is one large part of that history. Over the next several weeks, we’ll be highlighting a site, park or visitor center dedicated to helping us learn more about the Oregon Trail.


Farewell Bend Park

Farewell Bend Scenery

23751 U.S. 30 Business, Huntington, OR 97907

A friend, fellow blogger and great photographer, of my husband Douglas, Mike McBride was driving across America this summer and posted these shots along the Oregon Trail. You can find more scenic photographs by Mike using the links below. Just one of the many scenes along the 2,000 mile Oregon Trail.

Farewell Bend and the Oregon Trail

After following the Snake River for 330 miles, Oregon Trail pioneers rested above the bend in the river here, then bid farewell to the Snake River and continued their trek. Look for a small iron cross, visible from U.S. 30, that marks the location where the Snake River Shoshone Indians battled with pioneer travelers in 1860.  Restored covered wagons rest at the park entrance and next to the Oregon Trail kiosk.  You can also visit the National Historic Oregon Trail Interpretive Center on Flagstaff Hill just east of Baker City, no more than an hour’s drive away.

Farewell Bend State Recreation Area web site

Previously on On the Trail:

Video: A Presentation on “The Promise” – A Reading of Chapter One

Video: Video: A Presentation on

Dawn Comer Jefferson (L) and Dr. Rosanne Welch (R) present on their book, The Promise

 

On Friday March 21st my co-author, Dawn Comer Jefferson and I had the pleasure of making a presentation on “Slavery and the Oregon Trail” based on our book The Promise to the 3rd, 4th and 5th grades of Carpenter Avenue Elementary School as the guests of the non-profit Parents For Carpenter.

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Video: A Presentation on “The Promise” – What to bring on the Oregon Trail?

Dawn Comer Jefferson (L) and Dr. Rosanne Welch (R) present on their book, The Promise

 

On Friday March 21st my co-author, Dawn Comer Jefferson and I had the pleasure of making a presentation on “Slavery and the Oregon Trail” based on our book The Promise to the 3rd, 4th and 5th grades of Carpenter Avenue Elementary School as the guests of the non-profit Parents For Carpenter.

Transcript:

Comer Jefferson: Another thing about going on the trail is that when people were moving, from the South to the West, they would pack their belongings. They would sell their farms and pack their belongings and they would travel on the trail. So do you think you could bring your piano on the trial? Students: (Nooooo) Your sofa? Students: (Nooooo) Armchair? Yes? Students: (Nooooo) but people tried. So they packed them in their wagons. And as they traveled on the trail, and over mountains, through rivers, across streams, they had to throw them out along the way. So, you would see someone’s piano tossed on the road. You’d see someone’s sofa tossed on the road. They would break them up and burn them to start fires so they could stay warm. They had to keep their load as light as possible.

Welch: Has anyone ever seen the Griffith Park museum, the Gene Autry Museum? Lovely! They had a whole room dedicated to things that were left along the trail. ANd they have letters from people who took the trail. it is really quite a lovely place to go. And imagine the things they thought they could bring. Because they had never travled that far. They didn’t know how bad it was. They didn’t know how bad it could get.

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Video: A Presentation on “The Promise” – The Great Equalizer

Video: A Presentation on

Dawn Comer Jefferson (L) and Dr. Rosanne Welch (R) present on their book, The Promise

 

 

On Friday March 21st my co-author, Dawn Comer Jefferson and I had the pleasure of making a presentation on “Slavery and the Oregon Trail” based on our book The Promise to the 3rd, 4th and 5th grades of Carpenter Avenue Elementary School as the guests of the non-profit Parents For Carpenter.

Transcript:

Comer Jefferson: So one of the things about slaves going on the Oregon Trail and going to the new territories is that the Oregon Trail was sort of the great equalizer and everyone was sort of the same. It made everyone equal. A lot of people traveled in wagon trains and the wagon trains would have a driver and would be pulled by oxen, usually, not even horses. People on horses would ride beside. Oftentimes, everyone had to walk. Every child had to walk. Not just the black children — the salves — like what our family was used to, but all the children would have to walk. 2000 miles.

Welch: So let’s start right now. Are you ready? (crowd) We can go right now? We’ll go from here. We’ll go to Missouri. We’ll be there in about, I don’t know, two years?

Comer Jefferson: So the kids would have to walk. A lot of times the women would have to walk, but everyone was treated the same.

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Video: A Presentation on “The Promise” – What is slavery?

Video: A Presentation on

Dawn Comer Jefferson (L) and Dr. Rosanne Welch (R) present on their book, The Promise

 

On Friday March 21st my co-author, Dawn Comer Jefferson and I had the pleasure of making a presentation on “Slavery and the Oregon Trail” based on our book The Promise to the 3rd, 4th and 5th grades of Carpenter Avenue Elementary School as the guests of the non-profit Parents For Carpenter.

Transcript:

What’s interesting to us  — people who study slavery — is the idea that slavery was different in the United States than it had been in the past. Maybe when you study world history, you’ll find out that in ancient Rome and ancient Greece and in Egypt they had slaves. It was a style of labor. That’s what they did, but the way you became a slave in those ancient places was, you were part of a group — two sets of soldiers and you come to war together and this team lost. So the losers became the slaves of the winners. That meant that you knew your slave was as smart and as tough as you were and, just by whatever the accident was of that day in battle, he had lost. So you had respect for him and you could have him teach your children to read or to write poetry or to fight or any of these many things. So there was a weird level of respect in the ancient times. When we come over to the United States and we’re getting started as colonies and all that lovely stuff, we decided its difficult to do that, because if you take slaves that look like you and they run away, other people don’t know they ran away from you and then you lose the money that you put into buying that person. So we decided it made a lot more profitable sense to got to one place where people tended to look differently than the folks who had actually first come to the United States. When we went to Africa and we brought people here — kidnapped them — then we suddenly decided that one whole group of people was only meant to be slaves. That changes how we think about them. We didn’t qualify them as human beings. We qualified them as property — as if you were trading in cars. So this changed people’s attitudes towards each other and obviously was one of the many things that created racism in America. Something we are still talking about wanting to end today. So slavery here became a much worse situation and some people say that because it got so bad that’s why a bunch of people decided that they wanted to end it. Which is what led to the Civil War. 

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Video: A Presentation on “The Promise” – The Story

Video: A Presentation on

Dawn Comer Jefferson (L) and Dr. Rosanne Welch (R) present on their book, The Promise

 

On Friday March 21st my co-author, Dawn Comer Jefferson and I had the pleasure of making a presentation on “Slavery and the Oregon Trail” based on our book The Promise to the 3rd, 4th and 5th grades of Carpenter Avenue Elementary School as the guests of the non-profit Parents For Carpenter.

Transcript:

Thanks for having us. My name is — like Arlene said — Dawn Comer Jefferson and I have a 5th grader here. I am a writer/editor for television and also for books and I wrote this book, called The Promise, with my friend, Rosanne Welch, who is a college professor and also a television writer. The Promise is based on a radio show that I did for National Public Radio and it is based on a true story. Now some of the kids in the last discussion had already read it. Have any of your read this? Ok, then I will tell you a little bit about it. it’s based on a true story and it’s about a family in the 1850’s in Louisiana — a family of slaves — and it’s told from the point of view of the nine-year-old daughter in the family. And because the father can read and write, he was asked by his master to go on the Oregon Trail. It was a promise of freedom when they got to Oregon, but after traveling on the trail and having all sorts of hardships happen to them, when the master got to Oregon, he freed the parents, but kept the children. In 1854, the salve parents took the master to court and sued him for custody of their children and won. It’s a true story which basically influenced whether Oregon — which at the time was a territory, not a state — whether Oregon would come into the Union as a free state or a slave state. Because Oregon came in as a free state, so did Washington, so did California, and it really shaped  the way we live today and the way the war went, as well. We thought the story was interesting because it all hinged on the story of this little girl.

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On the Trail: The National Oregon/California Trail Center

America is full of history and the Oregon Trail is one large part of that history. Over the next several weeks, we’ll be highlighting a site, park or visitor center dedicated to helping us learn more about the Oregon Trail.


The National Oregon/California Trail Center

On the Trail: The National Oregon/California Trail Center

The National Oregon/California Trail Center is located within the beautiful Bear Lake Valley of Southeastern Idaho and situated on the historic site of the original Oregon Trail.

The Trail Center was built to preserve, perpetuate and promote the pioneer history and heritage of the Oregon/California Trail and the Bear Lake Valley.

The Center interprets the story of the pioneers who braved the arduous, six-month, 2,000 mile journey across the unsettled American West from Missouri to the Oregon Territory. The interpretation of this epoch migration is told using live actors within historically accurate interpretive areas located in the center. Vistitors join a simulated wagon train headed west and experience what it was like to prepare for the journey.

The Center also includes the Peg Leg Smith Trading Post gift shop, two sets of large and spacious public restrooms, the beautiful Allinger Community Theatre for viewing films and experiencing cultural/musical events, the Simplot art exhibit featuring the Oregon Trail paintings of Idaho artist Gary Stone, and the Rails and Trails Museum that highlights the heritage of the Bear Lake Valley as well as exhibits from the Bear Lake County Historical Society, Union Pacific and Daughters of Utah Pioneers. — NOCTC Web Site

320 North 4th Street, P.O. Box 323 | Montpelier, Idaho 83254

Previously on On the Trail:

The Promise – A Flyer to share with your friends, family and contacts!

We created this flyer to send to a variety of bookstores and Visitor’s Centers along the Oregon Trail and realized it might be useful to you for sharing with your friends, family and contacts. If you know someone who might be interested in The Promise, please pass along this flyer and a link to the web site — http://welchwrite.com/promise/ . It is available in both JPG and high-quality PDF. Use the links below to download.

Thanks for your support and help in sharing The Promise!

The Promise - A Flyer to share with your friends, family and contacts!

Download The Promise Flyer in PDF format

Download The Promise Flyer in JPG format

Video: A Presentation on “The Promise” – Abolition and the Law

Video: A Presentation on

Dawn Comer Jefferson (L) and Dr. Rosanne Welch (R) present on their book, The Promise

 

On Friday March 21st my co-author, Dawn Comer Jefferson and I had the pleasure of making a presentation on “Slavery and the Oregon Trail” based on our book The Promise to the 3rd, 4th and 5th grades of Carpenter Avenue Elementary School as the guests of the non-profit Parents For Carpenter.

Transcript:

Welch: What’s interesting about the legal method, we thought, again in Oregon at that time the territory was debating “Do we want to be a slave state or a free state?” We had a little rule for a while in the United States. Any time one territory wanted to enter, they had to have 2 territories — one would be slave and one would be free so that everything in the government was balanced. So no one could out vote each other. Right? So that was their deal. So you had to decide and there was an opportunity for the west coast — California itself could have been a slave state. IF you ever drive up near Bakersfield we grow cotton in California and cotton was a crop that required slave labor. So, this was a possibility and people had both sides if the argument. And luckily, in the case that Mary’s family went through, the judge happened to be an abolitionist. And we had those people from the very beginning.

Comer Jefferson: Did everyone hear her? An abolitionist is someone who wants to abolish or destroy slavery.

Welch: Exactly. Right. And we had people like the Adams Family — not the one’s who go click click — John Adams and his family were abolitionists in their own right in New England and they actually had a place for the Underground Railroad — which is whole ‘nother book we have to write, but — So, people from the very beginning of the country were against it, but they needed enough people on their side to overturn the idea. So, in our case, in this story, the judge had abolitionist sentiments — which is hose they would have phrased it back in the day. And so he could have judged either way on this case, but he chose to judge for the slave family to point out that that was the side he was one and the side Oregon should be on.

Comer Jefferson: …and he did it based on the testimony of Mary, the 9-year-old girl who is the heroine of the book, because we really wanted to have a little girl who was a strong heroine in a story and we thought that Mary’s story was the one to tell.

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On the Trail: Names Hill, Wyoming

America is full of history and the Oregon Trail is one large part of that history. Over the next several weeks, we’ll be highlighting a site, park or visitor center dedicated to helping us learn more about the Oregon Trail.


Names Hills, Wyoming

On the Trail: Names Hill, Wyoming

Names Hill is a bluff located on the bank of the Green River in the U.S. state of Wyoming, where travelers on the Oregon and California trails carved their names into the rock. It one of three notable “recording areas” along the emigrant trails in Wyoming along with Register Cliff and Independence Rock.

Names Hill was located near a heavily used crossing of the Green River. The earliest human recordings at the site are Native American pictographs.[3] European American names began appearing as early as 1822 as mountain men crossed the river on their way to the beaver streams of the Western Rocky Mountains. In 1844,Caleb Greenwood and Isaac Hitchcock lead the first wagon train over what would later be called the Sublette-Greenwood Cutoff, along the way crossing the Green River at Names Hill. The wagon trails would rest at the Green River following a 40 miles (64 km) waterless trek across the prairie, providing an opportunity for travelers to add their names to the hill.[4]

Among the more famous names inscribed on the rock is famed mountain man Jim Bridger. Some have disputed the authenticity of the signature as Bridger was thought have been illiterate.[3]

Wikipedia

More information on Names Hill, Wyoming:

Previously on On the Trail: