Horses, wagons plied Oregon Trail even into 1900s

John Terry, a columnist with The Oregonian, writes that a question he answered several weeks ago about when animal-powered migration ended drew quite a response from his readers:

Though travel on the Oregon Trail subsided substantially with the advent of rails, a good many folks still made their way to Oregon via the method traditionally linked to the great wagon trains of the 1840s and '50s. "My mother . . . traveled with her parents and siblings by mule and horse-drawn wagons from Larned, Kan., in 1878 to Silverton, Ore.," wrote Don Bryant of Lake Oswego. "They settled somewhere in what I believe may have been called Howell Prairie. They were one unit of what was a rather considerable wagon train." "My grandfather, John Ross, and his brother, Clifton Ross, came across the Oregon Trail in 1891 from Nebraska," said Carole Putman of West Linn. "My maternal grandparents started out in Ogallala, Neb., which is on the Oregon Trail, around 1896," said Chuck Barrows of Portland, and, based on birth records, lived in Vernal, Utah, in 1897, Walla Walla in 1899, Laramie, Wyo., in 1900, Mackey, Idaho, 1902, arriving in St. Johns in 1906. They used horses to pull their wagon and buffalo chips to cook with in areas where wood was scarce."