Day 86 - Sunday, August 22

What a night up at altitude…

At the top of the pass, roughly 8,500’, we decided to stay up there so I could jump out early and resume from where we left off. Chris has a knack for picking the most picturesque spot for our boon-docking and this one was epic; overlooking an idyllic lake valley, but exposed. We ate dinner and the wind which was gusting at 50+ mph made it feel like the rig might get blown over. After dinner I got into bed around 7:30pm and Chris stayed up. At 10pm Chris was all action as there was hail, lightening, huge wind and it felt and sounded like we were in danger. Chris pulled up the stabilizers worried about lightening strike. Next he pulled in the extenders because of all the wind pushing on us. With the windows open we huddled in our beds hoping to get through the night and too cold from that point on to get out of bed to close any of the windows!

Thinking I would get out early, the wind, rain and cold were in full force at 4am so we waited until sun rise, bundled up and got out. Shortly after I left the rain cleared but the cold and 30mph wind in my face today became my real adversary as I worked my way through the Continental Divide.

Lucky was having another good day chasing cattle, antelope and rabbits.

As I worked my way through the passes as fit as can be and fully stocked, I couldn’t help wonder how in the world the pioneers made it pushing or pulling wagons with their families and all their possessions.

After a big day climbing, today was difficult with a constant 20-30 mph headwind that never ceased. Head down, on the side of the road, one foot in front of the other for 36 miles…

Some big history today which I will include in the pictures below.

All for now, thank you for your ongoing support -

Cheers,

David.

Our perch where we camped for the night

A stream on the Continental Divide

A superb lunch of chicken soup with rice and freshly sautéed Brussels sprouts with salt, pepper and garlic.

Sweetwater River - this was the river that the Mormons followed from Sweetwater Junction after the North Platte all the way to South Pass. This is the last place it can be followed as it goes up to its source from here into the Wind River Range.

Without South Pass, the entire history of the United States’ expansion west of the Mississippi would have been different. South Pass got its name to distinguish it from the tedious and difficult northern route through the Rocky Mountains taken in 1805 and 1806 by Lewis and Clark through the Bitterroot Mountains.

As any aficionado of the Corps of Discovery knows, the Bitterroots nearly destroyed the dreams of that expedition. By the time the Corps stumbled out of the mountains, they were frozen and near death from starvation. Even today, few roads cross the Bitterroots, and the country between the great Missouri River and the mighty Columbia remains as topographically complicated as it was when Lewis and Clark crossed it.Thus, the discovery of a direct land route across the Continental Divide with a relatively easy grade was a godsend to those who hoped to see the United States of America stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Without South Pass, it is almost certain that the Pacific Northwest would have been permanently claimed by the British and the southern part of the continent would have remained part of Mexico. South Pass, the isolated little saddle that straddles the Continental Divide in the midst of Wyoming, still the least populated state in the nation, truly provided the key to today's United States.

While the pass had been used by American Indians for millennia, the first known usage by white men occurred in 1812 when Robert Stuart and six companions crossed the mountains on their return to the East from Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia, on the Oregon coast. In 1832, Capt. Benjamin Bonneville and a caravan of 110 men and 20 wagons became the first group to take wagons over the pass.

Then, on July 3, 1836, missionary Marcus Whitman crossed the pass with his wife, Narcissa, and their missionary companions, Henry Spalding and Eliza Hart Spalding.  Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Hart Spalding became the first white women to cross the Continental Divide at South Pass.

This tiny trickle of white people would become a stream in the 1840s and a river in the 1850s and 1860s. Between 1841, when the first Oregon-bound wagon train was organized, and 1869 when the transcontinental railroad was completed, somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 emigrants crossed South Pass on the trails bound for Oregon, California or Utah’s valley of the Great Salt Lake. Their multiple routes converged to form a common trail corridor near Fort Kearny in what’s now central Nebraska before parting again beyond Dry Sandy, a short way west of South Pass.

As the years went by, commercial freight traffic, bound east as well as west, became steadily more common on the route across South Pass. The 1850s saw stagecoaches carrying passengers and mail offering first monthly, then weekly and finally daily service.

The Pony Express was established in the spring of 1860, and at its inception could carry a letter from St. Joseph, Missouri via South Pass to Sacramento, California in just two weeks. Construction of a transcontinental telegraph line began about the same time along the same route; by the fall of 1861 the line was finished and the Pony Express disbanded.

After 1862, much of the commercial traffic moved south to the Overland Trail, which crossed what’s now southern Wyoming by a more direct route, most of which later became the route of the Union Pacific Railroad and Interstate 80. The telegraph continued to follow the South Pass route until the late 1860s, when it was moved south to the railroad line.

The Oregon Trail winds from South Pass toward Pacific Springs. Terry Del Bene photo.For westbound travelers, the push to the South Pass crossing started at Independence Rock where their slow, steady climb over the Continental Divide began. Many didn't even realize the backbone of the Rockies had been conquered until they reached. Pacific Springs west of the pass, so gradual was the incline.

And the exact elevation of that backbone has been disputed throughout modern times. Today, it is fairly well established that the crest of South Pass is situated on the Continental Divide in Fremont County, Wyo., about 10 miles southwest of South Pass City at 42 degrees 21 minutes north latitude and 108 degrees 53 minutes west longitude, at an elevation of 7,440 feet above sea level, or 2,267.712 meters.

Pioneer photographer William Henry Jackson based this sketch of wagons and the transcontinental telegraph line near South Pass, with the Oregon Buttes in the distance, on his experiences in 1866, when he first crossed the pass as bullwhacker for a freight outfit at the age of 23. The men to the right of the wagon train are shooting at the fleeing pronghorn antelope.

The Oregon Trail coming through the South Pass

The famous “Parting of Ways” where the trails take their separate ways.

About 18 miles after travelers on the Oregon Trail crossed the Continental Divide at South Pass, they reached a junction known now as the Parting of the Ways. The right fork went west toward Fort Hall in present southern Idaho, while the left continued southwest toward Fort Bridget and Salt Lake City. The Fort Hall route was a cutoff, opened in 1844. It saved about 46 miles and two and a half days’ travel, but only by crossing a waterless, sagebrush desert.

Diarists sometimes referred to the roads at this junction as the California and Oregon trails. The northerly, straight-west route—the “Oregon” road across what’s now known as the Little Colorado Desert—was most often called Sublette’s Cutoff, although some called it Greenwood’s Cutoff. The decision to take one branch or the other was not irrevocable. The trails diverged again farther on, offering more than one way to Oregon or California.

Joel Palmer’s July 20, 1845, diary entry notes that “By taking this trail [the Sublette Cutoff] two and a half days’ travel may be saved; but in the forty miles between Big Sandy and Green River there is no water and but little grass.”

Despite its hardships, the cutoff became popular, as J. M. Hixson wrote four years later, on June 19, 1849. “Formerly the Oregonian and California emigrants went by Fort Bridger, but the past two years they had mostly taken the right hand road. So we took that although it was understood there was a forty-five mile desert before we came to Green River.”

By July 25, 1849, an informal message system had sprung up at the junction. Elisha Perkins wrote, “At the forks of the regular road & where Subletts cutoff leaves by[passing] Ft Bridger I saw some 40 or 50 notes stuck up in forked sticks with directions and news & c. from those in advance to acquaintances behind, none however from anyone I knew.”

These message posts were elsewhere as well and apparently unmolested. Perkins’s entry continues, “This kind of post office is very common at the different points on the road & I have never known an instance of any note or scrap of paper being disturbed or misplaced. Every person looks to see who they are from & goes on leaving all as he finds it.”

Apparently the sticks were not set deeply in the ground. About a week later, on Aug. 2, 1849, J. Goldsborough Bruff reported that “[a] notice requested travelers to throw stones up against the base, to sustain the stick.”

The following summer, on July 15, 1850, John Steele’s account of his company’s night journey to the junction conjures up hardships of blind travel through barren country by covered wagon. “Owing to the rank growth of sage all the wagons followed the same track, and of course the dust was deep and suffocating; and besides this, many oxen and horses had died on the way, and it was difficult for us to avoid stumbling over the carcasses which lay near the road; and so, considering the darkness, and the tainted dust-laden air, neither of us desired to repeat that six miles’ walk.”

Conditions were not greatly improved, Steele continues, even after he and his party could see. “A little before dawn we found the junction, and the train halted, hoping that daylight might reveal a patch of grass. It was a vain hope; the sandy plain was dry, and produced only bunches of greasewood and sage.” Despite previous days of little feed and water, they chose Sublette’s Cutoff. “[O]ver the same barren waste, and the sun beaming from a cloudless sky, we came to Little Sandy.”

Two years later, travelers were still coming through. On July 2, 1852, John Hawkins Clark’s party found “[a] man stationed at the forks of the road ... trying to persuade the emigrants to take the right hand trail. ‘Gentlemen,’ says he, ‘men, women and teams are starving on the Salt Lake road. There is no grass for a hundred miles, the water is poor and poisonous, and if by any chance any of you live to see Salt Lake the Mormons will rob and steal everything you have got, take your women and send you out of the country as bare as you came into the world.’”

Clark was not deceived, however. “The grand secret of this man’s persuasive eloquence was that he was the proprietor of a ferry and wanted as much travel over it as he could get. As we were not of the number he could persuade we proceeded on to Little Sandy river, where we went into camp.”

Parting of the Ways has been the subject of many misunderstandings. On Highway 28 a few miles beyond the BLM interpretive overlook at South Pass, a marker erected by the Historic Landmark Commission of Wyoming in 1956 proclaims this site to be Parting of the Ways, stating, "This marks a fork in the trail, right to Oregon, left to Utah and California."

Thirty-two years later, the Oregon-California Trails Association erected another marker next to this one, which correctly states that the true Parting of the Ways lies another 9.5 miles to the west. This site on Highway 28 is now widely known as False Parting of the Ways and directions to trail sites in this area will often reference "False Parting." The real site will often be called "True Parting." At True Parting, the eye can follow the divergent trails for miles towards the horizon.

Parting of the Ways marked a spot where many emigrants bade a tearful farewell to friends they would probably never see again.

Boon-docking in the desert