Oregon Trail Wagon Ruts, Wyoming

the oregon trail where over half a million pioneers went in search for a better life and this trail dates back to 1843-1806 but by 1869 the railway came through it took between four to six months to cross this desolate landscape there were no roads they just had to find their way i mean can you imagine pulling a wagon up here i mean look how deep it is okay so they may have cut some of these down a bit yeah it's just a it is pretty amazing to think i mean this is this is preserved so well in the rock and at one point this was no man's land way out in the middle of absolutely like they used to say this you know this was the new frontier and even uh in this section i know it's a lot of it's worn away to the point where it almost doesn't seem like it but there's see right in front of us there's another rut which continues on yeah so they didn't all go in exactly the same line you know follow my leader because over the years because over half a million people came through this throughout the years so they did kind of go in little segments i mean like you can see another one here and this was three trails in one heck they had what the mormon trail this is the oregon trail and the california trail yeah and then they kind of all met up certain areas and then obviously look at independence rockets yeah [Music] oh wow look at this oh wow so we know that they used to carve their names along the trail i don't know whether or not these are all original pioneers or over the decades other people have carved their names look at that oh yeah that's pretty neat isn't it it is you see several people have have gone and done that because believe this is a sandstone if i'm correct if i believe so i don't know it's very uh if yeah you can feel the it it does flake off so it's pretty fairly easy to carve names and things but also as you can kind of tell they're not gonna last forever a lot of them are starting to disappear yeah because there's a bunch on i would think these are more modern oops because uh he said the early pioneers they they took their time and they did they grow very neatly yeah [Music] [Music] here's some more very well defined ruts so these are coming in from a slightly different direction they are they said they took they said they didn't just follow each other i mean some of them were years apart so they would just try to find the way that looked the easiest at the time the thing that is so fascinating about these look how narrow you can almost see the wagon tracks yeah the thickness of it and what makes this so remarkable is like i said this is just our past preserved here in the rock but even some people that are viewing this right now some of their ancestors could have been the ones on these trails and that's just incredible to think about [Music] so [Music] do [Music] [Music] wow there's even more up here yeah well like we said before there wasn't an actual road or anything they just took the best trail that they could right [Applause] so so [Music] do [Music] [Music] and it wasn't just the pioneers that use these trails the military did in fact there were several military bases scattered along the trails for protection but also fur traders and trappers yeah i mean i know there was a lot of forts that uh were up along this trail and just to kind of keep observed i think the army was also in charge in the late 1800s uh for protecting the pioneers and the people on the trails yeah and the reason why there's so many crisscrosses in here is because the platte river was so dangerous to cross back in those days because there were no dams or anything to tame it and they used to lose too many wagons and livestock by crossing it so they would prefer to go a more well i guess an easier route in that respect but to us looking at this rocks a more hazardous and i don't know difficult route i guess yeah i guess that's the one thing that kind of makes you because you see these rocks and it's like okay well that's bit intimidating but you see a river especially if there's a narrow cross and you think well that's the easiest way but that sometimes can be the most dangerous like you said get washed away don't know what the current's like how deep it gets so believe this is the last little section that we found through here and you can kind of this is really deep we'll give you a comparison five foot three and a half and that half an inch is really important yeah so it's about up to your shoulder yeah it looks like there's also another trail on top as well and you can see yeah it's got another rut system it's almost like that was maybe because it's like there's that wagon wheel which would have also ended up on this side where you're standing and then over to this as well so you can see the actual ruts right here so there's this rut this rut and the makings of that one there maybe this this stone here was slightly weaker and easier to get through yeah it could have been softer softer right and then like we set off into the distance so they kept going so perhaps nature has hidden the trail from us a bit in recent years but maybe there's more further along i'm sure there's more rock croppings and certain things and they've been carving their name in a lot of these spots in the sandstone so there's probably a lot more out there i think most of these carvings though are new they're not the pioneer carvings no yeah these ones are definitely more new but maybe somewhere way out there where people haven't gotten to so this is one of the pioneer women's graves lucinda rawlins now there's a little bit of discrepancy the information that i read she actually died here on this spot in 1849 and her original grave marker was destroyed by vandals and thrown into the river oh jeez and this obelisk was built in uh 19 in the 1930s i think 1913 34 1934 however some websites say she was born in 1849 and died in 1934 so i think the first one is more apt seeing as she was meant to be one of the first pioneer women yeah i would say the same thing and plus you can see in the uh the distance there those are the oregon trail ruts so she was buried here up on a hill overlooking the platte river on the journey and do you know what it was she died of was it i have no idea one website said that she just died of illness [Music] now if you recognize this area you know exactly where we're going next so make sure you stay tuned for that episode and on that note get out there go and explore put another pin in the atlas and we will see you on our next adventure or on patreon bye [Music] are we going to look at that one or look at that one what the hell okay it's on well we can look at that one i said just split between the two the other one that is our tour through the carvings now our next stop is going to be register rock join us now get out there go and explore put another pin in the atlas and we will see you on our next adventure what about something like that okay okay we can both do it so people did call their names as we know but it's difficult to know whether or not these are pioneers or whether or not people have called their names over the decades and some of these for their hand printing they have some several people but there's some more here i think it's a sand stone so it's fairly malleable but i can see also they're disappearing quickly [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you