Was George Seton incompetent?

In this movie George Seton was an old mountain man and army scout serving as the wagon master of a civilian wagon train from Westport, (now part of Kansas City, Missouri) on the Missouri River to Oregon in 1846.

The movie ends at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, only part way to Oregon. During this stretch of the journey water becomes scarce and one hoped for water hole turns out to be dry. Seton says that the next water hole is several days ahead and severely rations water. Finally it starts to rain. During the drought one of the immigrants accuses George Seton of being incompetent.

The Oregon Trail starting from Westport, Independence, or Kansas City followed the Kansas River upstream to the Little Blue River and paralleled that river northwards to the Platte River.

"The Platte was about 1 mile (1.6 km) wide and 2 to 60 inches (5.1 to 152.4 cm) deep. The water was silty and bad tasting but it could be used if no other water was available. Letting it sit in a bucket for an hour or so or stirring in a 1/4 cup of cornmeal allowed most of the silt to settle out."

https://www.google.com/search?q=the+orgeon+trail&oq=the+orgeon+trail&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.6391j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

The trail went up the Platte to the forks and then up the North Platte into Wyoming. Fort Laramie is where the Laramie River joins the North Platte River. And there were many small streams and rivers that flowed into the larger rivers like the Platte. So even though the plains were rather dry, there was no need to depend on waterholes.

So apparently George Seton was not, or not merely, incompetent, but cursed by some sort of drought curse that dried up all the creeks and rivers on the route to a historically impossible degree! Fortunately the drought ended before hundreds of thousands of pioneers and all the native tribes died in the following years.

Or maybe George Seton was brilliantly imaginative. The first group of 18 men to use the Oregon trail left in 1839. The group with the first three wagons to reach the Columbia River in Oregon made the trip in 1840. There was a wagon train in 1841 and another one in 1842. The great Migration of 1843 was the start of large scale use of the Oregon Trail.

So by 1846 there was a few years worth of experience on the Oregon trail.

Thousands of travelers died of cholera on the Oregon Trial in 1849-1855. They camped near good water sources and people and animals left their wastes too close to the good water sources, contaminating them and infecting later travelers who camped at those places.

Nobody knew the cause of cholera in those days. But people knew some diseases were contagious for thousands of years before that.

So someone familiar with the Oregon Trail in 1849-1855 would know that it had suddenly become a dangerous place for cholera and might consider it caused by all the wagon trains passing along it in recent years. And he might have noticed that cholera was rare beyond Fort Laramie. So he might have decided to bypass the common routes east of Fort Laramie to avoid cholera and only rejoin the main Oregon trail once past Fort Laramie. so he might have wanted to avoid the main rivers and travel through higher, rougher ground which would be slower travelling. And the rivers and creeks would be smaller and have less water farther up in the hills.

And if the region was struck by a terrible drought.that year it might dry up the smaller creeks and rivers.

That theory might explain why no bodies of water were seen as the wagon train traveled to Fort Laramie. Another theory would be that the wagon train did travel the regular Oregon Trail alongside rivers and an even more terrible drought dried up all the rivers so they weren't seen during the journey.

Or maybe the geography of the west was much different in the fictional universe of this movie and the journey from Westport to Fort Laramie didn't follow the western rivers because there weren't any convenient western rivers to follow.

Watching The Oregon Trail again on Sept. 2, 2018, I noticed that they had scenes with a moving line tracing the movement of the wagon train west toward Fort Laramie. And the moving line seemed to follow the Platte and the North Platte Rivers.