West Toward the Setting Sun Eric G. Dalke Introduction The migration up the Oregon Trail which started in Independence, Missouri and followed through to Oregon City, Oregon was considered one of the greatest feats of all times. From 1843 to 1863, before the railroads came, approximately 300,000 men, women and children with all their belongings strapped to the inside or the outside of their heavily built Conestoga wagon or the lighter Yankee Schooner headed West toward the promised land. However about 30,000 or 10 percent of the emigrants didn't make it and lost their lives along the journey. With their animals following behind, riding within, or pulling the vessel, the Pioneers traveled alongside their mules or Oxen for 2000 miles of hard, rugged untamed wilderness to reach a destination to be described by many as the closest thing to the biblical Eden that North America had to offer, or better known, as the Oregon Country. This story focuses on the Carpenter family, the boy's uncle Slim Bodine, and to a lesser extent many other pioneers who wanted to leave their past behind and start a new life free of landlords, droughts, taxes, inclement weather, over-crowding, bad crops and to some- freedom from the law. The intense need to travel to new lands and conquer them sometimes can't be explained, other than to say that mankind has always been searching over the horizon for something new and different and the trek to Oregon was definitely that.