Beginning with the first large wagon emigration in 1843, the Oregon Trail carried tens of thousands of Americans from Missouri toward Oregon Country, a difficult journey of more than two thousand miles driven by hopes for free farmland, economic opportunity, and new lives in what some called the "Garden of the World." The trail crossed harsh prairies, deserts, rivers, and mountains, and emigrants endured exhaustion, contaminated water, disease, death, and the loss of livestock and possessions, while journals preserved vivid accounts of the road and the people who traveled it. Long before emigrants arrived, Native peoples had lived across the region for thousands of years, sustaining themselves through hunting, gathering, fishing, and trade, but overland migration brought epidemics that devastated native communities and reduced resistance to the appropriation of their lands, even as trade between Indians and emigrants often flourished. The movement west unfolded within a larger contest over Oregon involving Great Britain, the United States, Spain, the fur trade, and American expansion, and by the covered wagon era the route had become a major corridor used by a diverse overland population moving toward Oregon and California.