
While in the Portland area we decided this year to go to Oregon City and visit The End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center. Because there was some kind of art fair on the grounds the interpretive center had a special admissions price of only $2 per person.
The only drawback was that normally you have an in-costume guide who walks you through the center telling you about everything. The center has a large number of artifacts and heirlooms from the trail along with excerpts from diaries that tell an amazing story.
We were able to watch the 30-minute movie, Bound for Oregon…”one more river to cross”, which recounts traveling the Oregon Trail from the diaries of those who made the trip. It is hard to imagine the number of people who travelled the trail and the hardships they endured on the five-month trip from their old home in the East to their new home in the West.
The interpretive center’s web site provides answers to some frequently asked questions in their Oregon Trail 101 page including:

- What is the Oregon Trail?
- Where did the Oregon Trail begin and end?
- What’s this “Oregon Country” you keep mentioning?
- Why did people want to go there?
- Didn’t that make the Indians angry?
- Yikes! Why didn’t the Indians try to kick the settlers out?
- So Lewis and Clark paved the way for the settlers?
- What were the British doing there, anyway?
- So the British were trappers and the Americans were farmers?
- Now that you mention it, isn’t there a California Trail, too?
- How long did it take to get to Oregon?
- What was the trip like?
- How many people came west on the Oregon Trail?
- When was the Oregon Trail in use?

Afterwards we rode the free Oregon City Trolley around the town. We stopped at the Museum of the Oregon Territory where the number of exhibits and historic artifacts were amazing. We turned corner after corner to find more and more exhibits.
We then walked across the street and viewed Willamette Falls. From what I have read, the falls have lost quite a bit of its appeal because of the industrial development all around the falls and because a so much of the river gets diverted into a series of navigaton locks.