THE GRAVES THE OREGON TRAIL FORGOT
Here’s something fascinating out of Wyoming this week.
Historians are using cadaver dogs to help locate graves along the Oregon Trail that have been lost for more than 170 years.
We remember the Oregon Trail as one of the great chapters of the American West: wagon trains, mountains, rivers, disease, hunger, accidents, and thousands of people heading toward places they had never seen because they believed something better was waiting for them.
When we think about how badly that journey could go, we tend to think of the most infamous example: the Donner Party.
The Donner-Reed Party traveled the great Oregon-California emigrant corridor before splitting away in Wyoming and taking the supposedly faster Hastings Cutoff. The delays helped put them in the Sierra Nevada too late in the season, where they became trapped by snow.
But theirs was only the tragedy that became famous.
The trails themselves were lined with graves, often marked with little more than a wooden board, a pile of stones, or a nearby tree. The wagon trains moved on. Weather came. Decades became generations. The markers disappeared.
Now historians are combining old diaries, physical evidence, modern technology, and dogs trained to detect traces associated with human decomposition to find some of those people again.
One possible grave belongs to 17-year-old Louise Lithgow, who died of consumption while traveling west with her family in 1853. A contemporary diary described where she was buried, and more than 170 years later, a dog alerted at a location consistent with that description.
History remembers trails, battles, presidents, generals, outlaws—and the Donner Party.
But history is mostly made up of people like Louise Lithgow: people who lived, loved, suffered, hoped for something better, and then disappeared from memory.
Sometimes all that remains is a sentence in somebody else’s diary and a patch of Wyoming earth.
And sometimes, 173 years later, somebody goes looking for you.
— Jefferson Bartlett
