The Paul & Helen Henderson Oregon Trail Research Collection - a research collection of photographs, maps, correspondence, documents, books, and much more - was moved to the North Platte Valley Museum in late summer of 2002. Projects to index and enter the vast collection's contents into a database are ongoing.
The Henderson Story
In the 1920’s, a young man by the name of Paul Henderson went to work for the CB&Q Railroad. There was probably nothing outwardly remarkable about young Paul and certainly no hint of the legacy he was to leave emigrant trail historians. Paul had been interested in the history of the area since, as a boy, he found an 1832 half dime at the site of an abandoned stage station on the Sidney Deadwood Trail. Conversations with “old timers” on the railroad whose eyewitness accounts of the wagon trains headed for Oregon ignited his passion for the Oregon Trail. They remembered soldiers stationed at Fort Laramie and buffalo roaming the plains. On layovers in Guernsey, WY, they would show him the still visible wagon wheel ruts and the many roughly marked pioneer graves.
As luck would have it, Paul met a lady named Helen at a Historical Society meeting. She had grown up near a popular camping spot of Mormon pioneers. She spent her childhood finding chards of broken pottery and other relics marking their passing. Together, Paul and Helen, who made their home in Alliance (and later Bridgeport, NE), would spend every spare minute for the next fifty years walking, photographing, mapping, and researching the overland trails. Paul retired from the railroad after forty-six years and then spent eight years working for the Wyoming State Parks Commission. Paul Henderson was not a scholar, in fact he was known as the Caboose Historian. He had no point to make and no theory to prove. He and Helen were simply fascinated with the history of the overland trails and the people who traveled them. Their research is characterized by the precision and meticulous detail that one would expect of a scientist. Author of The Oregon Trail Revisited, Gregory Franzwa said,
“Throughout our research we kept running across the name Paul Henderson…His name started cropping up on books published in the 1930’s, the latest mention in the long bibliography being in the early 1950’s.
We were somewhat startled to find that Paul Henderson had maps on file in both the Wyoming and the Nebraska historical society archives.
We remembered how disappointed we had been in the Crown maps, but we drove to Lincoln anyway, to look over Henderson’s work. There they were, at a half-inch to the mile- the Oregon Trail from Independence to The Dalles, Oregon.
We studied those maps intensively. We couldn’t at that time find one single flaw. And now, after having traveled the trail in its entirety, some stretches more than once, we still can’t find a flaw. The work is monumental.”
Today, the Henderson Trails collection is believed to be one of the most comprehensive and complete trail research tools in existence. It contains thousands of slides, dozens of maps, thousands of photographs, several manuscripts, and over 300 pioneer diaries. Though the Hendersons focused on emigrant trails, they also researched closely related topics providing scholars with a wealth of information about Native Americans, trading posts, military forts, trail cut-offs, early settlements (and their founders), and of course pioneer graves. As a sideline, the Hendersons served as advisors in the rebuilding of historical forts, cartographers, guides for documentary producers and authors, and became prime locators of pioneer graves for families. In the twenties and thirties, the Oregon Trail did not generate much excitement, but the Hendersons knew that the history needed to be preserved. Thanks to them, much of it was. Today most of the Trail has been plowed under or built over. In many locations, the Henderson’s record, in photographs and maps, is the only visible record that survives.
The Henderson Collection consists over 100 boxes of historical material, including over 375 diaries, guides, journals, and letters of western and trail travelers from 1805-1883; manuscripts by Paul and Helen Henderson from 1924-1975; and numerous files of notes, correspondence, hand-drawn maps, diagrams, and photographs.
Noted Oregon Trail researcher and author Gregory M. Franzwa has described the Henderson maps alone as “priceless,” and Paul Henderson himself as “a one-man historical society on the trails of the American West”. Franzwa later writes that the maps in this collection “are the finest by far and despite years of research by many other trail historians, his scholarship remains unchallenged”. This world-class collection is vital to any person making a serious study of the western America’s overland trails, and will become more important as time goes by.
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