Saved on Jerry Eichhorst’s computer in his Boise home is an Excel spreadsheet with a project he’s been working on for three decades.
“You can see I’ve got a lot of different things in here,” he said, pointing to the list of almost 3,000 rows. “I’ve got a lot of work to do to compile all these.”
What kind of a collection lies in the color-coded lines on his screen?
Each row in Eichhorst’s spreadsheet records the diary entries of a pioneer who traveled across the Oregon and California trails.
“Here’s a diary from Andrew McClure, 1853,” Eichhorst said, pointing to a specific line on his sheet. “For this diary, I’ve compiled it all the way from the Main Trail 1, which is where he entered Wyoming, all the way through to Burnt River (in Oregon), Main Trail 9.”
Eichhorst’s meticulous spreadsheet contains different journal entries with the author’s name, the dates of their entry and which trails they traveled on.
For 30 years, Eichhorst has collected and compiled these historic documents, published his findings, taught classes about his research and presented his work.
To him, however, it has never been about the byline or the awards.
“I want to bring the trail to life,” Eichhorst said.
Eichhorst’s journey to pioneer research has ‘kind of been fate’
Eichhorst has been the president of the Idaho chapter of the Oregon-California Trails Association for 15 years, but his ties to the trails began long before he assumed his current role.
Eichhorst was born in Omaha, Nebraska, near the Mormon Trail Center at Winter Quarters, a museum that commemorates the winter encampments of Latter-day Saint pioneers. He grew up in Kansas City, a mile off the road that leads to where the crossing of the Missouri River was for the start of the Oregon Trail. Today, Eichhorst’s Boise home is just 4 miles south of the Oregon Trail.
To him, the fact that his life has traced the trails of Western pioneers is no coincidence.
“It’s kind of been fate, I guess,” Eichhorst said.
The process of finding, compiling and sharing pioneer journal entries is ‘a lot of hard work’
There isn’t just one source that Eichhorst looks to when he’s searching for firsthand accounts of trail journeys. The thousands of accounts he has compiled have come from visiting several libraries and ordering copies of historic documents, searching through Google Books for relevant transcripts and contacting other diary researchers to share material.
“It’s a lot of hard work,” Eichhorst said, describing the process — and finding the documents is only the beginning.
“I want to bring the trail to life.”
— Researcher Jerry Eichhorst
Once he has a copy, Eichhorst reads through the journal entries, picks out notable events and details and sorts them by location on the trail, all documented in what he refers to as his “master spreadsheet.”
Compiling detailed entries about pioneers who walked these routes takes hours at a time, and it is a task Eichhorst does almost daily. While Eichhorst explained the process, he motioned to his screen, pointing out a single red line that flagged his stopping place from late the night before.
‘It still brings me chills’
Though most of Eichhorst’s cataloging and research is done online, he’s held some of the original diaries in his own two hands.
“It brings me joy to go out on the trail with other people and tell them the stories at the locations so they can share some of that fun.”
— Historian Jerry Eichhorst
Eichhorst described the experience of flicking through James Bailey’s handwritten, leather-bound diary from 1863 in search of a specific passage that detailed a burial site Eichhorst found near Mountain Home in Idaho.
“It still brings me chills,” Eichhorst said, recalling the feeling of holding the original artifact in his white-gloved hands. “That’s bringing history to life.”
Stories from pioneer records are ‘a part of our history’
“There’s a lot of interesting stories out there,” Eichhorst said.
“There was a lot of hardship,” he added. “There was a lot of death. There was a lot of joy.”
All of these moments, Eichhorst said, are “a part of our history, and we’re fortunate to have so many good documented accounts of people who traveled across the country.”
For Eichhorst, sharing these stories with others is just as important — if not more — as reading them himself. He often leads tours of the physical locations that the records describe for groups of chapter members, visitors or collaborating staff from the Bureau of Land Management or National Park Service.
“It brings me joy to go out on the trail with other people and tell them the stories at the locations so they can share some of that fun,” Eichhorst said.
He hopes to one day write a book that shares maps, pictures and “the best of the diary quotes” to aid historical research and preserve this era of American history.
“To put this amount of work into compiling these and then not do anything with it would be a waste,” Eichhorst said. “So if I can share this information and help other people understand and enjoy these trails and the stories of these trails, then I think it’s a useful endeavor.”