Who was the last person to travel the Oregon Trail?

We have had visitors at the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center who recalled making the trip to Oregon by wagon as late as 1912 because their families couldn't afford to buy train tickets, but the last wagon widely known to have braved the Oregon Trail was driven by Ezra Meeker in 1906.



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The Trail was in regular use from 1843 until the 1870s. When the Union Pacific completed the first railroad link to the West Coast in 1869, the preferred route became by train to San Francisco, then north to Oregon by ship, but wagon trains could still be seen on the Oregon Trail as late as the 1880s.

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Perhaps some 300,000 to 400,000 people used it during its heyday from the mid-1840s to the late 1860s, and possibly a half million traversed it overall, covering an average of 15 to 20 miles (24 to 32 km) per day; most completed their journeys in four to five months.

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The End of the Oregon Trail By 1890, the railroads had all but eliminated the need to journey thousands of miles in a covered wagon. Settlers from the east were more than happy to hop on a train and arrive in the West in one week instead of six months.

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With 2,170 miles of the original route now in the hands of various private and public entities, access to trail segments depends upon the permission of the land owner. Some segments are open to the public for hiking and other means of recreation, while others are not.

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When a family decided to join a wagon train, it often had to save money for three to five years before it could even begin the journey. The wagon cost around $400. The cost of the trip with supplies could be as much as $1,000.

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Travelers used grass or leaves or just plain dirt. Bark was also a paper substitute. It wasn't pretty, but no worse than many other realities pioneers faced on the emigrant trail.

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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.

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