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The End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center maintains an online version of many
different Oregon Trail, Clackamas County, Oregon City, and the State of Oregon history
articles. This section provides you with the ability to learn more about these topics.
Oregon Trail FAQs
Frequently asked questions about the Oregon Trail.
Prairie Schooners
A diagram of a typical Oregon Trail wagon accompanied by a descriptive essay.
Provisions and Prices
What the emigrants brought along and how much it cost.
The Road to Oregon
Written by Dr. Jim Tompkins, a prominent local historian and the descendant of Oregon Trail immigrants, The Road to Oregon is a good primer on the history of the Oregon Trail. It is suitable for grades 6 and up, though younger students may benefit from it if they are strong readers.
Doctors and Diseases
The medical theories of the mid-1800s were little better than superstition.
Women on the Oregon Trail
Making a covered wagon a mobile home was the challenge facing the women who braved the emigrant road.
Meanwhile...
Keep things in perspective with a timeline of significant, though not necessarily relevant, events in the mid-Nineteenth Century. As with the Oregon Trail chronology, this timeline addresses the peak years of emigration, from 1841 to 1866.
Black Pioneers of the Pacific Northwest
Despite the fact that many emigrants left the United States in the 1840s and '50s because of steadily increasing political and social tensions arising from the spread of slavery, they could not escape these problems. The "exclusion laws" were passed to keep slaves and the free descendants of slaves from settling in the Oregon Country in the hope of avoiding the troubles of the East. Just the same, a trickle of black emigrants ended up settling here, and though their stories are rarely told, their presence helped shape the region as we know it today.
The material included in this section came from an exhibit prepared to honor Black History Month at the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center. For further information, we refer you to the sources used in that project: Across the Wide Missouri and The Year of Decision: 1846 by Bernard DeVoto; Black Pioneers of the Northwest, 1800-1918 by Martha Anderson; The Black West by William Loren Katz; Builders of the Northwest by Jalmar Johnson; Centralia, The First Fifty Years by Herndon Smith; Free Land for Free Men by Vera Martin Lynch; Frontier Politics and the Sectional Conflict by Robert W. Johannsen; The Mountain Men by George Laycock; A Peculiar Paradise by Elizabeth McLagan; Puget's Sound by Murray Morgan; Wagon Wheels by Candy Moulton and Ben Kern; Washington Times and Trails by Joan and Gene Olson; and the newspaper article "Washington State History Often Forgets This Heroic Puget Sound Country Pioneer" by Bruce Chapman, printed in The Seattle Post Intelligencer on February 23, 1996.
Oregon Historic Trails Report
In 1998, the Oregon Trails Coordinating Council issued its final report, inventorying the sixteen historic trails recognized to exist within Oregon's borders. The story behind each trail is explained, and the recommendations section includes lists of known interpretive resources along each trail and suggests driving directions which approximate the routes of the historic trails. For further information on Oregon's historic trails, a bibliography is also included for each trail.
Before the Settlers
Explore the legends and known histories of the Indian tribes that lived near the Trail's End.
The Chinook Jargon
British and American traders in the 1700s were baffled by the many native languages spoken in the old Oregon Country. They learned a few key words from coastal tribes and gradually built up a pidgin language which allowed them to communicate with the resident Indians. In turn, the Indians learned the new, evolving language so they could trade with sailors and merchants from Europe and eastern North America. For a hundred years or so, the Chinook Jargon was the key to communication between Euro-Americans and Native Americans -- some early settlers in Oregon even complained that their children spoke better Jargon than they did English! Though the Jargon was almost lost to living memory during the Twentieth Century, it is now enjoying a renaissance of sorts... Learn all about it at chinookjargon.home.att.net
Historic Floods in Oregon City
Flood waters have inundated Oregon City time and again since its founding. The same confluence of geology and geography that makes the area prone to flooding led to the founding of Oregon City and explains why we keep rebuilding.
Historic Maps
View our collection of historic maps.
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