Most people know the Oregon Trail as a line in a history book or a pixelated game from childhood. Wagons crawl across the plains. Rivers must be forded. Someone inevitably dies of dysentery.
What often gets lost is the human part of the story. Who actually walked those miles? Who watched the landscape change day by day? And perhaps most importantly, who took the time to write any of it down.
In 1836, long before Bend existed as a town and before Oregon was even a state, Narcissa Whitman made the long journey west across the Rocky Mountains. Along the way, she kept a written account of the trip through letters and journals. Her words are widely considered the first surviving journal written b...