Beginning on May 22, 1843, nearly one thousand Americans left Missouri for new lives in the Oregon Country, and during the next two decades more than 50,000 emigrated to a land of abundance that Abigail Scott, an emigrant of 1852, called the "Garden of the World." The Oregon Trail stretched for more than two thousand miles through harsh country that Riley Root, an emigrant of 1848, called a "Landscape without soil! River bottoms with scarcely enough grass to support emigrant teams," and as emigrant numbers increased, the fragile land’s ability to sustain life eroded while privation, illness, and death became constant companions. By the time travelers reached this portion of the trail, many were exhausted by fatigue and lack of sleep. Across what is now Oregon, the route changed many times during the emigration era: early emigrants braved the wild Columbia River or followed its rugged south bank from Fort Walla Walla, while in the 1840s an alternate route was established from Pendleton to The Dalles across the Columbia Plateau, shortening the journey to the Willamette Valley but lacking the water found along the river. On the west side of the John Day River, emigrants faced a choice between the road left toward Barlow Pass and over the Cascade Mountains or the road right toward The Dalles and down the Columbia River. Many in the 1840s tried to avoid the risk and expense of hiring a canoe or bateau by following the Columbia’s poor, sandy, rocky south bank, where steep ascents along ledges and bluffs sometimes took them up to a mile from the river. Others used Indian canoes or Hudson’s Bay Company bateaux on the Columbia, which before the modern network of dams was a raging torrent whose rapids, rocks, and whirlpools brought both fearful excitement and death.