Armstrong kids Oregon trail puzzle

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Across
  1. 2. Mules are strong, can go faster, but are often tricky to handle. Mules also had tendencies to bolt and become unruly. ____are slower, but more reliable and tougher than mules. They will eat poor grass. _____ were very strong and could haul fully loaded wagons up ravines or drag them out of mudholes. A large wagon needed at least three pairs of _____ to pull it.
  2. 4. The Oregon Trail was improved over the years shortening the average trip by ____ days between 1849 and 1859.
  3. 7. The water of the river in Nebraska while readily accessible was silty and bad tasting but it could be used if no other water was available. Letting it sit in a bucket for an hour or so after stirring in a 1/4 cup of ______ allowed most of the silt to settle out and helped make it a bit more palatable.
  4. 10. Conestoga wagons are generally portrayed as the normal wagon used for the trip across the Oregon trail, but the truth is that most pioneers instead tackled the trail in more diminutive wagons that become known as “prairie ________” for the way their canvas covers resembled a ship’s sail. These vehicles typically included a wooden bed about four feet wide and ten feet long. They could even be caulked with tar and floated across un-fordable rivers and streams. Prairie schooners were capable of carrying over a ton of cargo and passengers, but their small beds and lack of a suspension made for a notoriously bumpy ride.
  5. 11. Along with painting messages and mottos on their wagon canvasses, pioneers also developed a tradition of carving their names, hometowns and dates of passage on some of the stone landmarks they encountered during their journey west. One of the most notable prairie guest books was Independence Rock, a 128-foot-tall granite outcropping in Wyoming dubbed “The Register of the Desert.” Thousands of travelers left their mark on the rock while camping along the nearby Sweetwater River. Those in a hurry sometimes even paid stonecutters a few dollars to carve their messages for them. In addition to Independence Rock, pioneers also left behind signatures on Register Cliff and Names Hill, two other sites in this state where they crossed the continental divide.
  6. 13. The trail began at the old Independence Landing north of Independence, Missouri. Here emigrants gathered after a five- or six-day journey upriver via _____ from St. Louis. The center of activity in the small town of Independence was the bustling square. Most of the new pioneers camped a mile or two from the square and were busily purchasing supplies needed for their long trek.
  7. 18. When the wagon train stopped at night, they would form the wagons into this geometric shape for defensive purposes.
  8. 20. Only around 80,000 of the estimated 400,000 Oregon Trail emigrants actually ended their journey in Oregon’s ___________ Valley (at the end of the trail). Others took one of the trail forks to Utah, California or Washington, or they simply gave up and settled along the way somewhere.
  9. 21. in Nebraska where the Oregon Trail followed the Platte river, it was over a _____ wide, because the ruts became so bad they had to keep moving further and further from the river.
  10. 22. While most Oregon-bound emigrants traveled a route that passed by landmarks in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon, there was never just one set of wagon ruts leading west. Pioneers often spread out for several miles across the plains to hunt, find grazing patches for their animals and avoid the choking dust clouds kicked up by other wagon trains. As the years passed, enterprising settlers also blazed dozens of new trails, or cutoffs, that allowed travelers to bypass stopping points and reach their destination quicker. These shortcuts were especially popular in Wyoming, where the network of alternative pathways meandered more than a hundred miles north and _____.
  11. 24. Only around 80,000 of the estimated 400,000 Oregon Trail emigrants actually ended their journey in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Of the rest, the vast majority splintered off from the main route in either Wyoming or Idaho and took separate trails leading to California and Utah. The _____ Trail was eventually traveled by some 250,000 settlers, most of them prospectors seeking to strike it rich in the gold fields. The Utah route, meanwhile, shuttled roughly 70,000 Mormon pilgrims to the lands surrounding Salt Lake City.
  12. 25. People who died were often buried in graves directly under the ______ to keep wild animals from digging up the graves and consuming the body.
  13. 27. was the main scourge of the trail. It could attack a perfectly healthy person after breakfast, and he would be in his grave by noon. However, many would linger in misery for weeks in the bouncy wagons. When it was obvious a person wouldn’t last the day, the train would often hold up moving in order to wait for the end. Burials often were done right in the middle of the trail, where wagons could roll over and animals trample it down in order to erase the scent so wolves could not pick up the scent.
  14. 28. When passing out of present-day Nebraska into present-day Wyoming on the way to the summit (the continental divide) the tail crossed the _________ river up to nine times.
  15. 33. Rumors abounded about the wonders of the west. People ____ Oregon the “land of milk and honey.” The U.S. government promised settlers large plots of land for almost nothing. They said the Oregon soil was bottomless and a man could become rich by farming.
  16. 34. Through much of present-day Nebraska, the Oregon trail followed this river which was described as "too thin to plow and too thick to drink".
  17. 36. ________ could be purchased that claimed to people what they needed to know to successfully cross the Oregon trail. These were often incomplete at best and inaccurate at worst.
  18. 38. Rafts were used to float the Columbia River instead of going through the Cascade mountains by most travelers. After making it past the mountains, they put their wheels back on their wagons at the location of the present-day city of _______ Oregon (just past the confluence of the Sandy River for the last 25 miles) (hint it's name begins with a type of fish and ends with a suffix meaning broad valley).
Down
  1. 1. Both going up hills and down hills was difficult, but the ______ was by far the more dangerous of the two.
  2. 3. With more than 11,000 emigrants crossing on the Oregon Trail before the gold rush, traveling could be quite congested. Along the way, pioneers—like present-day Americans—had the desire to communicate and developed their own type of information highway called the "Bone Express," a system was created for posting messages along the trail by writing on cloth, wood, and especially _____. With this method, westbound emigrants and "go-backs" (those who were eastbound) could leave messages, advertisements, directions and warnings to fellow pioneers. In one instance, the desire to communicate was inspired by love. John Johnson and Jane Jones, two young pioneers who were attracted to one another but separated by their disapproving parents, developed a system of writing to each other on buffalo skulls with the code name "Laurie."
  3. 5. In the mid-1840s, settlers who traveled the Oregon Trail spent roughly $800 to $1200 to be properly outfitted. (Although there are many factors to Consider, the cost of supplies would equate to roughly $32,000 in 2014 dollars). Many of the pioneers raised their capital by selling their farms and possessions. Along the way they found inflated prices for scarce commodities at trading posts and ferries. Once arriving in Oregon, there were scarce supplies available for purchase, requiring more ability to work in ______ for goods and services, than cash for purchasing.
  4. 6. Largest known _____ train was 1000 _______s in 1843. But most after that were one to two dozen _______s.
  5. 8. The Oregon trail began in this state
  6. 9. It is estimated that between 1840 and 1860, Native Americans killed 362 emigrants (It is thought that 20000 deaths occurred along the trail, so this accounted for less than 2 ______ of the total deaths along the trail), and emigrants killed 426 Indians. Most of these fatalities occurred west of South Pass.
  7. 11. The boss on the trip west across the Oregon trail was known as the ________ . Sometimes men who had traveled the route before were hired and other times men from the group were selected.
  8. 12. Travelers were allowed to ________ in Oregon. This meant they could receive about one square mile of land for very little money and a lot of hard work. ( This program provided an area of public land in the West granted to any US citizen willing to settle on and farm the land for 5 years-ˈhōmˌsted).
  9. 14. Bridges and ferries soon were available as an alternative to fording or floating across rivers but often the owners charged a dollar a wagon and there were about 30 places where toll passage was available. You could always go through the river but it was dangerous and time consuming. Wages for a common laborer at that time (which would have included most of those traveling the trail was about 63 cents a day. So 30 tolls would have taken about 1 1/2 months wages.
  10. 15. The idea of crossing "the great American desert" and the perceived dangers caused many people who were not hunters or soldiers to purchase ______, many for the first time, which they were not used to handling. Mishaps with ________ caused many injuries and deaths.
  11. 16. The overloading of wagons was very common because people thought they "needed" more than they could actually take on the trail with killing the animals pulling their wagons. This meant that many sections of trail became junk heaps filled with discarded food barrels and wagon parts. Broken down prairie schooners and dead draft animals also littered the roads, and it wasn’t unusual to see personal items like books, clothes and even furniture. Fort Laramie in Wyoming eventually became known as “Camp ________” for its reputation as an Oregon Trail dumping ground.
  12. 17. By the time the trail was no longer used, there were an average of this many graves per mile.
  13. 19. Even though it took many months to cross the continent on the Oregon trail, it was faster and less expensive than going by _____ that had to travel over 1600 miles and took between six and seven months.
  14. 23. The basic path of the trail was followed by a small group of Missionaries to the Indians of Southeastern Washington's in 1836. It was lead a physician by the name of Marcus _________.
  15. 25. On a very good day, the wagon train might move _____ miles.
  16. 26. This major city kjust to the north the end of the Oregon trail did not exist during those years.
  17. 29. The Oregon trail was no longer used after this form of intercontinental transportation became available in 1869.
  18. 30. True or False: Attacks by the Native Americans took more lives than accident or sickness
  19. 31. On steep hills wagon wheels were tied with ______. When the hills got even steeper logs were drug behind the wagons to slow them down. And in a few cases, wheels would be removed, and the wagons lowered down the hill.
  20. 32. As the pioneers using the Barlow road began descending off from Mount Hood toward the Willamette Valley, they encountered Laurel Hill a stretch so steep that wagons had to be lowered by the use of ropes (and there are still scars on the rocks and trees visible today from the wagons being lowered). This made many of the pioneers very angry after having paid a huge toll to take the road.
  21. 35. The Barlow road was built a ______ road (that mean it was a a road made of tree trunks laid the many areas that would not support a heavily loaded wagon.) The road had five toll gates that served Barlow Road traffic from 1846 until 1915, when the right-of-way was willed to the State of Oregon and the last gate, near the town of Rhododendron, was removed. The route was one way — west — for its first fifteen years.
  22. 37. from 1843 until 1845, wagons could reach The Dalles, but from there the emigrants had little choice but to make a raft of pine logs, buy a raft from enterprising Indians, or rent a bateau from the Hudson’s Bay Company for around $80. Many lives were lost on the rapids of the Columbia River as it passes through the Columbia ______, the relentless winds overturned many a raft, and there was a stretch of impassable rapids that had to be portaged. Worse still, families were often divided as cattle were driven over Lolo Pass, on the northwest shoulder of Mount Hood, to Eagle Creek and Oregon City. Despite these hardships, almost one in every four emigrants chose the river route after the Barlow Road (with its toll of $175 in current dollars) was opened.