The Oregon Trail in Idaho and Oregon
This is the third in a series of related posts on the Oregon Trail. The first two are The Oregon Trail, Fort Kearny to Fort Bridger, and The Oregon/California Trail: Fort Bridger to Fort Hall . I appreciate your comments and feedback. Click on the pictures for full screen Fur traders were using different sections of the Oregon Trail as early as 1812 when New Yorker John Jacob Astor established Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia and needed an overland route to the east. Astor's competitors, The Hudson's Bay Company (British) and later, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company (United States) established trading posts along the route from Missouri to the Willamette Valley, at Fort Boise, near the confluence of the Snake and Owyhee Rivers, Fort Hall on the upper Snake River, and Fort Laramie on the North Platte River. In modern times, we tend to focus on the mystique of the mountain man trappers of this era but perhaps more important to the opening of western routes...