Here is a 'prairie schooner' in the eighteen thirties, crossing the mountains. It was Captain Bonneville who first brought wagons to and over the top of the Rockies. He abandoned them soon afterwards but he had 'blazed the trail' and succeeding traders and emigrants came to rely on the 'prairie schooner' as the best method of locomotion in spite of the hazards in crossing the Rockies, Snake River Canyon, the Blue Mts. and the Cascades. From the great migration to the northwest in 1843 on, these wagons moved in great trains. It is said that in 1853, about thirty thousand people crossed the Missouri river in these wagon trains bound for Oregon and California.
