Hello and welcome to our lecture, Go West, Young Man, Manifest Destiny. This lecture is a little different for us. We're kind of going to do a mini lecture from me, which you're used to, but a shortened version.
Then you're going to play the Oregon Trail video game online. Link is in the Canvas page. Then you're going to watch a video from the Ask a Mortician YouTube channel about the Donner Party, a very infamous group that went west and made so many mistakes.
So you're going to find out what those mistakes were so that you don't make them when you play the game again and see if you last any longer. And then we've got some questions to think about on the main page before you go to the Oregon Trail game assignment, which will have some kind of note-checky quiz-type things that you're used to, and some paragraph responses based on the questions on the lecture page for this one. So it's a little different.
I think we'll have some fun. So we're looking at why did people risk death on the Oregon Trail? Why are they going west in the first place? And what was manifest destiny? So on February 18, 1836, Narcissa and Narcissa Whitman, who you see here on the slide, were married.
And the very next day they headed west on foot. Now the Methodist Church sent them west as missionaries to what is now Washington State. So they're going all the way over here to Washington State.
So they're taking the Oregon Trail through Independence, Missouri, all the way over here. So here we are in North Texas. So here's Independence, Missouri. So they're going on the Oregon Trail through the Willamette Valley in Oregon. So it's about 2,000 miles, and they're following the Platte River as they go, which you can see on the map.
That is both the source of drinking water and disease on the trail. Narcissa was the first woman to attempt the trip, and in her group were the first wagons to do so. No one knew if they could make it. So people doubted if women or wagons could navigate the steep south pass through the Rockies, but once Narcissa and the Whitman wagons made it, others followed.
By 1843, over a thousand people had made the trek across the Oregon Trail, and Americans were mostly going to the far west. They were skipping over what came to be known as the Great American Desert. It'll later be farmland, but they need improvements in farm technology before they can really do that. So they're, for the most part, heading all the way to the West Coast, Washington, Oregon, and California. But we need to remember, this area is home to many Native American nations.
This was not empty space. In 1847, new settlers brought a measles epidemic to Whitman's town, and half of the Cayuse Indians died in that epidemic, including nearly all of their children. And they blamed the epidemic on white immigrants who had brought the disease with them.
In response, the Cayuse killed Narcissa and Narcissa Whitman and 12 other settlers. And when the leader of the attack was sentenced to death, he said, did not your missionaries teach us that Christ died to save his people? So we died to save our people. Now despite increasing violence by 1860, more than 300,000 Americans had made the trip west, and the ruts their wagons carved into the landscape are still visible today.
So head to the next video clip and take a look at that landscape.