27. Fact or Fiction: Did the Fax Machine Exist When Pioneer Wagon Trains Were Still Trekking Along the Oregon Trail?
Fact. The Oregon Trail was a roughly 2200-mile-long wagon route that connected the Missouri River to Oregon. It began as rough tracks and trails blazed and cleared through the wilderness by fur traders, in progressive stages, from 1811 to 1840. The trail’s segments were initially passable only to travelers on foot or horseback. By 1836, the section between Independence, Missouri, and Fort Hall, Idaho, was cleared to accommodate wagons, allowing the first pioneer wagon train to make that journey. More wagon trails were gradually cleared westward until in 1843, they reached Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
The trail became one of nineteenth-century America’s iconic symbols, as it pumped a seemingly inexhaustible torrent of land-hungry migrants from the settled East to the West’s open spaces. Wagon trains of pioneers inexorably pushed the Frontier ever westward, displacing Native Americans from their ancestral lands, and exploiting the newly seized territories for agricultural and mining usages. Is there any truth to the assertion in various memes that fax machines existed back when pioneer wagons were still rattling along the Oregon Trail?
