Read the first-person stories of people who actually made the trek. Settlers who reached the rock by July 4 knew that they were on schedule to reach Oregon before the snows started. Settlers in prairie schooner wagons - so many that the rutted trails they left in their wake are still visible across the prairie today - waited to write their names on Independence Rock, a huge granite boulder that marked the trail’s middle point. Surviving settlers scrawled and carved their names on rocks and into trees they passed, leaving evidence that they had passed that way - their marks are still visible today. It was no easy journey: Just planning it could take as long as a year, and the Oregon-California Trails Association estimates that one-tenth of the people who set off on the trail died along the way, many from disease, others from accidents. We tend to think of the Oregon Trail as a set route, but it was more flexible than that - settlers followed the same rough path, but everyone was always looking for a shortcut or a way around some of the trail’s trickier obstacles. The 2,000-mile journey from Independence, Missouri to Oregon City, Oregon, wound along trails through Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Idaho, though not always the same way every time. Mark the 175th anniversary of the wagon train that kicked off two decades of westward expansion by learning more about the wagon trail-turned-westward-highway that made their journeys possible. In May of 1843, one thousand pioneers set off from Elm Grove, Missouri toward the Willamette Valley, marking the first great migration along the route that would become the Oregon Trail.