In the early 1840s a few thousand farmers and homesteaders dared to try the grueling five-month trek across the often deadly 2,000 miles or so that lay between Independence, Missouri, and the alluring green of Oregon's Willamette Valley. The trek continued for nearly 20 years. Between 1845 and 1859, some 280,000 people took the Oregon Trail; an estimated 30,000 died along the way. Many of these were babies and toddlers who often did not live past age five, their deaths caused by dysentery, fever, almost any sort of infection. Settlers who were not expecting to pass the same way again were not careful of the garbage they left behind, causing the ones who followed to suffer and then die due to Cholera. Women died in childbirth. People were killed by carelessness; children fell out of wagons and were run-over and guns went off accidentally. Until the 1860s Western Indians rarely killed migrating settlers along the trail, though they stole horses, shot poison arrows at oxen and sometimes fired on passing wagons. .
Europeans and Indians.
In the earlier days of manifest destiny, America faced four problems. Namely, the British in the north, the Spanish in the southeast and Mexico, the French control of New Orleans and the areas west of the Mississippi and the Native Americans of all areas.
The first three issues of European controlled territories were more simply and ethically solved through various purchases of land. The US bought New Orleans, Louisiana and Florida from Spain and France. Our issues with the British up north were contained by our upper hand in the cotton boom and our ability to compromise on economic benefits. Our reactions to the Native American issue however was a little less civilized . . . .
No act of cruelty in any part of American history is any darker than that suffered by the American Indians. If you were to draw a map of the trails that manifest destiny paved, and the cities it built, you would simultaneously be drawing a map of the native American genocide that manifest destiny rationalized.