Cholera outbreaks and pandemics
That year, cholera was transmitted along the California, Mormon and Oregon Trails as 6,000 to 12,000 are believed to have died on their way to the California Gold Rush, Utah and Oregon in the cholera years of 1849–1855. It is believed more than 150,000 Americans died during the two pandemics between 1832 and 1849.
Westward Expansion Trails
The Oregon Trail, the longest of the overland routes used in the westward expansion of the United States, was first traced by explorers and fur traders for traveling to the Oregon Country. The main route of the Oregon Trail stopped at the Hudson's Bay Company Fort Hall, a major resupply route along the trail near present-day Pocatello and where the California Trail split off to the south. Then the Oregon Trail crossed the Snake River Plain of present-day southern Idaho and the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon before reaching the Willamette Valley. It was the only practical way for settlers in wagons without tools, livestock, or supplies to cross the mountains and usually thought critical to the colonization of the American West. Some of the first to travel the Oregon Trail were Christian missionaries, members of the Methodist Episcopal Church who established the Methodist Mission in 1834. Even though they didn't make many converts, they were impressed by the short amount of time needed to reach the Pacific Coast. Rumors about how the sun always shone there and wheat grew as tall as a man attracted American settlers.
The journey to the west was pleasant, but there were dangers and challenges along the route. There were diseases: cholera, measles, smallpox, and dysentery. Children were crushed under the covered wagon wheels, people drowned in rivers, were lost, starved, killed by Native Americans (very few pioneers), froze to death, trampled by buffalo, or shot by accident. With these accidents, many pioneers died. About 20,000 to 30,000 died on the Oregon Trail along the way in 40 years.