11. Nineteenth-Century Pioneer Symbol
The Oregon Trail became one of nineteenth-century America’s iconic symbols, as it pumped a seemingly inexhaustible torrent of land-hungry migrants from the settled east to the open spaces of the west. Wagon trains of pioneers inexorably pushed the new country’s frontier ever westward, displacing Native Americans from their ancestral lands, and exploiting the newly seized territories for agricultural and mining usages.
Between the 1830s and 1860s, the Oregon Trail was used by about 400,000 farmers, ranchers, miners, and other settlers and their families, who loaded their goods and hopes upon wagon, and trekked west in pursuit of their dreams. The trail’s use finally went into decline when the first transcontinental railway was completed in 1869, as trains made for a faster, cheaper, and safer journey.