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Article: Wagon Trains
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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WAGON TRAINS
WAGON TRAINS.
For purposes of protection and efficiency, traders and emigrants of the trans-Mississippi West before 1880 customarily gathered their wagons into more or less organized caravans or trains. William L. Sublette, a partner in the reorganized Rocky Mountain Fur Company, conducted a ten-wagon, mule-drawn train over the Oregon Trail from St. Louis, Missouri, as far as the company's Wind River rendezvous (in present-day Wyoming) between 10 April and 16 July 1830, returning to St. Louis on 10 October. Captain Benjamin L. E. Bonneville is usually credited with the distinction of having taken the first wagons through South Pass; in July 1832 his twenty-wagon train ...