50 Fun Facts About American Pioneers

Rather than for defense, why did pioneer wagon trains usually circle their wagons at night?

To corral their animals in the middle, emigrants parked the wagons nose to tail so the stock could not stray or be stolen overnight. Wagons were rarely circled as a fort.

Despite what films show, what did hardly any Oregon Trail emigrants do on the long journey west?

Hardly anyone chose to ride in the wagons, which had no springs and were too dusty and rough. Staying out also spared the tired teams the extra weight.

Which dried fuel, often gathered by children, cooked pioneers' meals on the treeless Great Plains?

Buffalo chips were dried bison dung, which looked like rotten wood and gave a clear, hot fire. Travelers fell back on them wherever there was no timber to cut.

Which folk hero roamed the Ohio frontier planting tree nurseries for settlers?

Johnny Appleseed grew his trees from seed, which gives sour fruit that was fine for the hard cider settlers drank. He fenced each nursery and left a neighbor to sell the saplings.

What killed more emigrants on the Oregon and California trails than any other cause?

Disease, above all cholera caught from fouled water at crowded campsites, was the main killer on the trails. In the worst years it took up to 3 percent of all travelers.

The classic computer game The Oregon Trail famously tells players "You have died of" which illness?

Dysentery became the game's best-known fate, printed on T-shirts decades later. Three student teachers built the first version in 1971 for an eighth-grade history class in Minnesota.

Which nickname did covered wagons earn because their white canvas tops looked like a ship's sails?

Prairie schooner was the settlers' own name for the light farm wagon that carried a family west. Its bed was only about 10 feet long and 4 feet wide.

Which animals, able to live on prairie grass, did Oregon Trail emigrants favor for pulling wagons?

Oxen cost less to buy and keep than horses, were calm to handle, and kept moving through mud and snow.

With few trees on the Great Plains, which material did settlers cut into blocks to build houses?

Sod bound by thick prairie grass roots was free and plentiful, so families stacked it into walls. Such a house needed constant repair and could wash out in heavy rain.

What nickname was given to the fortune hunters who poured into California during the gold rush?

Forty-niners took their name from 1849, the peak year of the rush. About 300,000 people reached California, roughly half of them by sea and half overland.

Which Native American woman interpreted for Lewis and Clark while carrying her baby son on her back?

Sacagawea's presence with a baby showed the tribes they met that the expedition came in peace. Her son, Jean Baptiste, was only about two months old when the explorers set out from Fort Mandan.

Which frontiersman cut the Wilderness Road into Kentucky and founded a fort town bearing his name?

Daniel Boone founded Boonesborough in 1775, one of the first English-speaking settlements west of the Appalachians. A critic later dubbed him "the Columbus of the woods".

Which Tennessee congressman, known as the "King of the Wild Frontier", died at the Alamo in 1836?

Davy Crockett broke with President Andrew Jackson in Congress and was the only Tennessee member to vote against the Indian Removal Act. His coonskin-cap image owes much to a 1950s Disney television series.

Which author turned her pioneer childhood in the Midwest into the Little House children's books?

Laura Ingalls Wilder was in her sixties when the first book, Little House in the Big Woods, came out in 1932. It is set at her family's log home near Pepin, Wisconsin.

Which president, born in a Kentucky log cabin, signed the Homestead Act giving settlers land?

Abraham Lincoln signed it on May 20, 1862, after the Southern states had left the Union and their members had left Congress. It offered 160 acres to anyone who farmed a claim for five years.

Which leader, nicknamed the "American Moses", guided Mormon pioneers west to the Salt Lake Valley?

Brigham Young earned the name for leading an exodus to what his followers saw as a promised land. The valley was part of Mexico when they arrived in 1847.

Which wagon train of 87 emigrants spent the winter of 1846–47 trapped by Sierra Nevada snow?

The Donner Party lost weeks on an untested shortcut, the Hastings Cutoff, and reached the mountains just as an early, heavy snowfall arrived. Only 48 of its members survived.

Which Vermont-born inventor's polished steel plow of 1837 cut cleanly through sticky prairie soil?

John Deere saw that cast-iron plows worked badly in the tough soil of Illinois, while highly polished steel scoured itself clean. He sold his first one to a local farmer in 1838.

What kind of animal was Seaman, bought by Meriwether Lewis for $20 before the expedition west?

A dog of the Newfoundland breed, Seaman was chosen because such animals swim well and are at home on boats. His price was half a month's pay for an Army captain.

Which state celebrates Pioneer Day each July 24, marking the arrival of Mormon settlers in 1847?

Utah makes the day an official holiday, with parades, rodeos and fireworks. It recalls the first Mormon company's entry into the Salt Lake Valley after being driven out of Illinois.

Which pioneer chore turned cream into butter by pumping a wooden staff up and down in a tub?

Churning was done with a staff called the dash, worked by hand inside a tall container known as a plunger churn or knocker churn.

Which foot-powered machine did pioneer women use to twist wool or flax fibers into yarn at home?

Spinning wheel treadles let the spinner keep the machine turning with one foot, leaving both hands free to draw out the fiber. The yarn then went to a loom to be woven into cloth.

Which frontier craftsman hammered red-hot iron on an anvil to make tools, nails and wagon parts?

Blacksmith was the general trade, able to make or mend almost anything in iron. The specialist who shod horses was properly called a farrier.

Pioneer soap was boiled from animal fat and lye, which was traditionally leached from what?

Wood ashes soaked in water give an alkaline liquor rich in potash. Native cooks of the Eastern Woodlands used the same ash lye to turn dried kernels into hominy.

Which cast-iron pot with legs and a rimmed lid for hot coals cooked pioneers' meals at the campfire?

Dutch oven cooks piled coals on the lid as well as underneath, so the pot baked from both sides. Lewis and Clark carried one, and it is the official state cooking pot of Texas and Arkansas.

Which food store kept a pioneer family's potatoes, turnips and carrots from freezing all winter?

Root cellar walls of earth held food just above freezing in winter and cool in summer. Apples can give off enough gas to spoil other crops stored nearby.

What name was given to a gathering where frontier women stitched a bedcover and swapped news?

Quilting bee talk often turned to serious matters of the day, including women's rights. It was one of the few approved social outings for 19th-century women, mixing shared work with a celebration.

Which farm leftover did settlers, copying a Native American craft, make into faceless dolls?

Corn husks were dried and tied into shape, with the silk used for hair. In one traditional story the doll lost her face as a punishment for vanity.

Which yearly booklet gave frontier farmers weather forecasts, planting charts and astronomy tables?

The Old Farmer's Almanac, published every year since 1792, came with a hole drilled in the corner so it could hang from a nail. Readers voted to keep the hole in the 1990s.

Frontier schoolchildren did sums on small wood-framed tablets of which smooth rock instead of paper?

Slate could be wiped clean and used again and again. By the nineteenth century, writing tablets made of it were used in nearly every school in the world.

Which Missouri town, where Harry Truman grew up, was the classic starting point of the Oregon Trail?

Independence earned the nickname "Queen City of the Trails" as the departure point for three great routes west. Congress later defined it as the official start of the Oregon Trail.

Which Nebraska spire, rising some 300 feet above its valley, was a famed Oregon Trail landmark?

Chimney Rock was recorded in many travelers' journals, though early visitors also called it Chimley Rock or Chimney Tower. It guided wagons on the California and Mormon routes too.

Which wide, easy Wyoming gap carried Oregon Trail wagons over the Continental Divide?

South Pass lies in a high region about 35 miles wide and is the lowest point on the Continental Divide between the Central and Southern Rockies. Fur traders made the first recorded crossing in 1812.

Which fertile lowland south of the Columbia River was the goal of wagon trains on the Oregon Trail?

Willamette Valley farmland was widely publicized as a "promised land of flowing milk and honey". Emigrants built their early capital there at Oregon City.

Which city, then a provincial capital of Mexico, ended a 900-mile trade trail from Missouri?

Santa Fe traders hauled their goods across dangerous plains, hot deserts and rocky mountains. The route stayed a vital commercial highway until 1880, when the railroad reached the city.

Which Nebraska river, "too thin to plow and too thick to drink", did the Oregon Trail follow west?

Platte water ran about a mile wide yet often only inches deep, too shallow and crooked even for a canoe. Its nearly flat valley made an easy wagon road heading almost due west.

Which 1803 land deal with Napoleon's France nearly doubled the size of the United States?

Louisiana Purchase land cost less than three cents an acre. Even so, the United States did not have the $15 million in its treasury and had to borrow it from foreign banks.

Which 1845 phrase, credited to editor John O'Sullivan, cast westward expansion as America's mission?

Manifest Destiny drew little attention when it first appeared in print. The term became popular only after opponents of President Polk criticized it.

Which Swiss settler owned the California sawmill where James Marshall found gold in 1848?

John Sutter was ruined rather than enriched by the find. Large crowds of gold seekers overran his land and destroyed nearly everything he had worked for.

In which future state did about 50,000 settlers race to claim land at high noon on April 22, 1889?

Oklahoma is the Sooner State because some settlers slipped in sooner than the law allowed to grab the best homesteads. Guthrie grew from no residents to about 10,000 by sundown.

Which animal's fur, prized for fashionable hats, drew trappers called mountain men into the Rockies?

Beaver hats went out of fashion in Europe just as the animal became over-hunted, and the trade collapsed. Many former trappers then earned their living guiding emigrant wagon trains.

Which mountain man, known for tall tales of Yellowstone, opened a trading fort on the Oregon Trail?

Jim Bridger became so linked with tall tales that other people's inventions were pinned on him. His own stories about geysers, though, proved to be accurate.

What name was given to the Black Southerners who migrated to Kansas in the great movement of 1879?

Exodusters numbered as many as 40,000, and their journey became known as the Exodus of 1879. It was the first general migration of Black people after the Civil War.

Which missionary killed near Walla Walla was among the first white women to cross the Rockies?

Narcissa Whitman made the 1836 crossing with fellow missionary Eliza Spalding. The next year she gave birth to the first white American born in Oregon Country.

Which graded schoolbooks, first published in 1836, were used in American classrooms for generations?

McGuffey Readers sold about 120 million copies between 1836 and 1960, a total in a class with the Bible and Webster's Dictionary.

Which circus animal did pioneers on the overland trails say they were heading west to "see"?

The elephant phrase meant gaining experience of the world, and pioneers used it with excitement as they set out. It took on a more negative ring only later.

Which insects swarmed the Great Plains in the 1870s, eating crops, leather and even sheep's wool?

Locusts of the Rocky Mountain species formed an 1875 swarm judged bigger than California. Less than 30 years later, the species was apparently extinct.

Too poor to buy wagon teams, nearly 3,000 Mormon pioneers walked west pulling which vehicles?

Handcarts had a crossbar at the front so they could be pushed or pulled, and ten companies used them from 1856 to 1860. Two that set out late were caught by heavy snow in Wyoming.

Which Wyoming fur-trading post, bought by the Army in 1849, was a popular Oregon Trail stop?

Fort Laramie was first called Fort William and then Fort John. The Army paid $4,000 for it as a base to protect the wagon trains of emigrants passing through.

Which birds does Mormon tradition credit with eating the crickets that attacked crops in 1848?

Seagulls did come and eat many of the insects, though frost and drought damaged that harvest as well. The pests, really a kind of katydid, have been called Mormon crickets ever since.