HELPP If a line is correct put a tick. Use the letter "V" as a tick. If a line has a word which should not be there, write the
word in a given space.
1. By the 1820s, it extended not much beyond the Appalachians. The move to the West as we now know it
began in earnest in the mid-1840s when the expression Oregon fever erupted.
2. Encouraged by the government to settle the north-western territory claimed also by Britain, thousands of
homesteaders were set off for a new life at the end of the Oregon Trail.
3. The peopling of the West became not just an opportunity to be seized, but a kind of mission.
4. The Oregon Trail is a somewhat misleading term. For one thing, it wasn’t a trail in the sense of a welldeTned track. It was a corridor, highly likely variable in width, across the grassy plains.
5. Moreover, after the Trst few years relatively a few of those who travelled the trail were heading for Oregon.
6. One of the great myths of the westward migration, compounded by a thousand movies, was that the
immigrants lumbered over the prairies in Conestoga wagons. These sturdy vehicles were uselessly heavy for
the long pull to Oregon or California.
7. They did not haul some freight west, but almost never did they transport families. Instead westward
immigrants used lighter, smaller and much nimbler wagons universally known as prairie schooners.
8. These were hauled not by horses, but by mules or oxen, which could withstand the hardships of prairie
crossings far better than any horse could.
9. A Tnal myth engendered by Hollywood was that wagons gathered in a circle whenever under attack by
Indians. They didn’t, and for the simple reason that the process would have been so laborious to organize
that the party would very probably have been slaughtered before the job was even a one quarter
accomplished.
10. Wagons were covered with a canvas, as in the movies, though that word was seldom used.
11. The material was more generally known in the nineteenth century as twill. Though wagon train was also
used (it is Trst recorded in 1849), the term wasn’t particularly apt.
12. For much of the journey the wagons fanned out into an advancing line up to ten miles wide to avoid each
other’s dust — and providing yet another obstacle to their forming into circles.
13. Many of the early homesteaders had only the faintest idea of what they were being letting themselves in for,
and often through no fault of their own. Until well into the third decade of the nineteenth century ignorance
of the West remained so profound!
14. Those who went west, incidentally, didn’t think of themselves as still being in America.
15. Until about the time of the Civil War, America was generally taken to signify itself the eastern states, so that
accounts of the time commonly contain statements like ‘Some people here [in Oregon] are talking about
returning to America’.
