介绍:
The Oregon Trail(P8)
In the 19th century ,millions of Europeans emigrated to the USA because they wanted to find a better life.Many of them couldn’t find work in cities like New York, so they left and went to find farmland in the west.The people, called settlers, travelled west through the mountains on the ‘Oregon Trail’
Some of these people hoped to find gold in California.The journey sometimes took more than a year.There are a lot of films, called ‘Westerns’,about the settlers on the trail.In most of the films, we see the Native Americans(‘American Indians’) attacking the settlers ,and the ‘Indians’ kill thousands of white people.But the truth is that the Native American were not the biggest problem for the settlers.In fact, most of them were very helpful to the settlers.
It is true that the settlers’ journey was extremely difficult .Many of them walked 3,200 kilometres, the whole length of the trail.They had wagons ,but the wagons were often too full, so people could not travel in them.Many parents also had to carry their small children.The people were very poor and many did not even have shoes—they walked the whole trail barefoot, in extremely cold temperatures.
More than 50,000 people, including many women and children, died on the trail.A lot of people died from illness like cholera, because the drinking water wasn’t clean.There were also a lot of accidents.Many people died under the wheels of wagons ,for example, and from accidental gunshots.
