I first became interested in the California-Oregon Trail as a result of spending time in the Sierra Nevada. Finding it difficult to ascend these mountains on foot, I wondered how on earth anyone could find a passage for wagons. As I learned more about this massive overland migration, I became even more curious. Now I wondered not just about the Sierra crossing, but how an even remotely efficient route across a continent with so many mountain ranges in the way, could have been found. Yet, despite the hostile geography, somehow early trappers, mountainmen, and settlers (often with the help of Native Americans) did indeed find a mostly flat, and mostly straight-line route, some two thousand miles long. And, then we must ask why did they do it? My curiosity had the better of me now.

The California-Oregon Trail is a two-thousand-mile long path across the country. Perhaps a half-million emigrants used the road to settle in California and Oregon before most migration along it ended when the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. Most of them walked the entire distance. For most the trail, they traveled on foreign lands, not yet part of the U.S. It was the largest voluntary migration of people in recorded history.

The trail began in any number of jumping off places along the Missouri river, quickly converged, and followed one river system after another until it terminated in either the Sacramento Valley, California, or the Willamette Valley, Oregon.

The crossing usually took five or six months by wagon, with pioneers traveling between ten and fifteen miles per day. The emigrants had to time their departure late enough to count on enough good grass on the prairies for the draft animals, yet early enough to cross the rugged and treacherous Sierra Nevada before the snows came. This usually meant leaving in April or May and hoping to arrive by October or early November at the latest.

The route followed major and minor river sytems the entire way to afford good water. It followed the Platte and North Platte halfway into present-day Wyoming, where travelers then had to switch to the Sweetwater, which they followed almost to the continental divide, at historic South Pass.

Once across the pass, the emigrants encountered severe desert terrain for the first time, in present-day western Wyoming. Here the trail crossed the Big Sandy and Green rivers to Fort Bridger, then northwest into present-day Idaho to connect with the Bear River system, and then on to the Snake River. Various cutoffs continued southwest into present-day Utah to avoid this northwest detour, but they were perilous and, in the end, they rarely saved any time.

At an anonymous spot of land in present-day eastern Idaho, along the Snake River, California bound emigrants split off from the Oregon Trail to join the Humboldt River in present-day northeastern Nevada. The Humboldt is 350 miles long and cuts diagonally across the state, heading directly for Sacramento. The water was murky and barely drinkable; it had no fish, and its banks contained choking dust. Eventually it simply disappears into a marshy sink near present-day Lovelock. This nearly stagnant brackish pool of water, no more than 20 feet wide and a few inches deep can hardly be called a river, yet it is what made crossing Nevada by wagon possible.

Here, at the Humboldt Sink, for the first time after 1700 miles on the trail, the pioneers found they had no river system to follow. They had two choices, both forty-mile desert crossings, one joining the Carson and the other the Truckee River. It would be made in one long forced march of two or three days, resting during the hot mid-day and traveling mostly at night. The loss of human life, livestock, and property of this last parched crossing, when people, animals, and supplies were exhausted, was epic.

The final obstacle was the precipitous eastern face of the Sierra Nevada. The first wagons to make it across were those of the Stephens Party of 1844. At the Humboldt Sink they met a Paiute Indian they named Truckee who led them west across the desert to a river that eventually led to a small lake at the foot of the Sierra. A pass was located at the west end of the lake, some 1,200 feet high (see Trails West photo). The wagons had to be disassembled, hauled over the pass in pieces, and then reassembled. It marked the opening of the California Trail. With improvements made the following year (via Dog Valley and Roller Pass), travel to California became general. In gratitude, the party named the river and lake after their new Indian friend. The river retains that name today. However the lake is now known as Donner Lake, and the pass discovered by Elisha Stephens is called Donner Pass, after the ill-fated Donner Party of a few years later (ironically, considering they failed to reach the pass).

The photos below show some of our scouting of the trail in Wyoming. Unlike many other areas, where the trail has been farmed over or obliterated by railroads, modern highways, or urbanization, much of the original trail still exists in Wyoming.

	Independence Rock. It was a major milestone along the trail. If you reached it by July 4, you were in good shape for making the mountains before the heavy snows.
	Climbing Independence Rock. It is steeper than it looks in this photo, and it's especially tricky on the way down.
	The trail as it skirts along the north side of Independence Rock, crossing the modern highway in the distance (looking east).
	Emigrant names carved into Independence Rock.
	The trail trace, looking west, toward Devil's Gate. The trail passes through the little pass in the mountains in the distance near the center of the photo. An OCTA marker can be seen in the foreground.
	Devil's Gate, a few miles east of Independence Rock. The Sweetwater River cuts this gorge. The trail detours around, a short distance to the south, but almost all who passed took the short hike to view the 500-foot-deep gap. All diaries mention this site.
	South Pass at the continental divide, along the trail. The ascent is so wide and gentle most emigrants, and modern travelers, cannot detect the summit across the Rockies. This marker was placed by Ezra Meeker on a return trip after crossing overland in 1852.
	South Pass, looking back down the trail to the east.
	Traces of the trail, looking west, near Big Sandy. This is the Sublette Cutoff. It saved about 50 miles and perhaps as much as three days travel, but it was a difficult route through hostile, barren high desert and rugged mountainous country.

One can almost hear the voices of the men, women and children who dreamed and suffered and died along this vast and lonely trail, the sounds of ox chains clanking, the grinding and crunching of steel rimmed wagon wheels, and the steady plodding of the oxen hooves, mile after mile, day after day.